
HEROE 




Class 
Book. 




CopyiightN" . VI 



COFOaGHT DEPOSm 




After a painting by Howard Pyle. 

General Andrew Jackson receiving the plaudits of his motley 
army after the victory at New Orleans. 



SOME 
FORGOTTEN HEROES 

AND THEIR PLACE IN AMERICAN 
HISTORY 



BY 
E. ALEXANDER POWELL 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON 



El 7$ 

.5 



Copyright, 1913. 191S. 1922, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
A 



PRIKTED AT 

THE SCRIBNER PRESS 

NEW YORK, U. S. A. 



MAR -7 1922 
0)C!.A6o4846 



FOREWORD 

This book is a tribute to some men who have been 
forgotten by Fame. Though they won for us more than 
half the territory within our present borders, they lie 
for the most part in obscure and neglected graves, some 
of them under alien skies, their amazing exploits all too 
often unperpetuated in bronze or stone. Though their 
names hold small significance for their countrymen of 
the present generation, yet they played great parts in 
our national drama. It was the persistent and daring 
assaults made by such men as Bean and Nolan upon the 
Spanish boundaries which undermined the power of 
Spain upon this continent and paved the way for Travis, 
Bowie, Bonham, Crockett, and Houston to eifect the 
liberation of Texas. Captain Reed of the General 
Armstrong, after holding off a British force twenty times 
the strength of his own, sunk his vessel rather than sur- 
render. To a pirate and smuggler named Jean Lafitte, 
more than any other person save Andrew Jackson, we 
are indebted for saving New Orleans from capture and 
Louisiana from invasion. After two decades of history- 
making in Hindustan, Boyd came back to his own coun- 
try and ably seconded William Henry Harrison in break- 
ing the power of the great Indian confederation which 
threatened to check the white man's westward march. 
A missionary, Marcus Whitman, by the most daring 
and dramatic ride in history, during which he crossed 
the continent in the depths of winter, facing death al- 



iv Foreword 

most every mile from cold, starvation, or Indians, pre- 
vented the Pacific Northwest from passing under the 
rule of England. Jedediah Smith blazed the route of 
the Overland Trail and showed us the way to California, 
and a quarter of a century later, Fremont, Ide, Sloat, 
and Stockton made the land beyond the Sierras ours. 

Adventurers though certain of these men admittedly 
were — and what, pray, were Vasco da Gama and Magel- 
lan, Hawkins, Raleigh, and Drake? — I think you will 
agree with me, when you have read their stories, that 
there is in them remarkably little of which we need to 
feel ashamed and much of which we have reason to be 
proud. But, because they did their work unofficially, 
in what might aptly be described as "shirtsleeve war- 
fare," because they went ahead without waiting for the 
tardy sanction of those who guided our ship of state, 
the deeds they performed have never received befitting 
recognition from the sedate and prosaic historians, the 
services they rendered have elicited but scant apprecia- 
tion from those who follow by the trails they blazed, who 
grow rich from the mines they discovered, who dwell 
upon the lands they won. And that is why I ask you, 
as in the following pages I lead these forgotten heroes 
before you in imaginary review, to salute with respect 
and admiration this company of brave soldiers and gal- 
lant gentlemen who so stoutly upheld American tradi- 
tions in many far corners of the world. 

E. Alexander Powell. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Adventurers All i 

When We Smashed the Prophet's Power . . 21 

The Pirate Who Turned Patriot .... 41 

The Last Fight of the "General Armstrong" . 67 

The Man Who Dared to Cross the Ranges . . 79 

Under the Flag op the Lone Star .... 99 
The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire . .123 

The Flag of the Bear 151 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

General Andrew Jackson receiving the plaudits 

OF HIS motley army AFTER THE VICTORY AT NeW 

Orleans ...... Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

William Henry Harrison's conferences with Te- 

CUMSEH at ViNCENNES, INDIANA .... 28 

Westward pressed the little troop of pioneers, 
across the sun-baked lava beds of southwest 
Utah 88 



ADVENTURERS ALL 



Even before the purchase of that vast inland basin 
known as Louisiana by Thomas Jefferson in 1803, a 
young Kentuckian named Phihp Nolan entered into a 
contract with the Spanish governor of New Orleans to 
capture for him bands of wild horses on the plains of 
Texas. The venture ended in tragedy when the Spanish 
colonial commandant general surprised and attacked the 
little party and killed Nolan and several of his companions. 
Whereupon Ellis P. Bean, a mere boy of seventeen, took 
command and conducted a running fight against the pur- 
suing Spaniards, until, almost exhausted, he accepted an 
offer of fair terms and surrendered. Immediately he and 
his companions were put into irons and marched off to 
prison in Mexico, where, after years of barbarous treat- 
ment, Bean finally escaped, joined the republican revolu- 
tion against Spanish rule, and rose to a high position in 
the service of the Mexican Government. 



ADVENTURERS ALL 

This story properly begins in an emperor's bathtub. 
The bathtub was in the Palace of the Tuileries, and, 
immersed to the chin in its cologne-scented water, was 
Napoleon. The nineteenth century was but a three- 
year-old; the month was April, and the trees in the 
Tuileries Garden were just bursting into bud. The First 
Consul — he made himself Emperor a few weeks later — 
was taking his Sunday-morning bath. There was a 
scratch at the door — scratching having been substituted 
for knocking in the palace after the Egyptian cam- 
paign — and the Mameluke body-guard ushered into the 
bathroom Napoleon's brothers Joseph and Lucien. 

How the conversation began between this remarkable 
trio of Corsicans is of small consequence. It is enough 
to know that Napoleon dumfounded his brothers by the 
blunt announcement that he had determined to sell 
the great colony of Louisiana — all that remained to 
France of her North American empire — to the United 
States. He made this astounding announcement, as 
Joseph wrote afterward, "with as little ceremony as our 
dear father would have shown in selling a vineyard." 
Incensed at Napoleon's cool assumption that the great 
overseas possession was his to dispose of as he saw fit, 
Joseph, his hot Corsican blood getting the better of his 
discretion, leaned over the tub and shook his clinched 
fist in the face of his august brother. 

"What you propose is unconstitutional!" he cried. 
"If you attempt to carry it out I swear that I will be 
the first to oppose you !" 

3 



4 Some Forgotten Heroes 

White with passion at this unaccustomed opposition, 
Napoleon raised himself until half his body was out of 
the opaque and frothy water. 

"You will have no chance to oppose me !" he screamed, 
beside himself with anger. "I conceived this scheme, 
I negotiated it, and I shall execute it. I will accept the 
responsibility for what I do. Bah ! I scorn your oppo- 
sition !" And he dropped back into the bath so suddenly 
that the resultant splash drenched the future King of 
Spain from head to foot. 

This extraordinary scene, which, ludicrous though it 
was, was to vitally affect the future of the United States, 
was brought to a sudden termination by the valet, who 
had been waiting with the bath- towels, shocked at the 
spectacle of a future Emperor and a future King quar- 
relling in a bathroom over the disposition of an empire, 
falling on the floor in a faint. 

Though this narrative concerns itself, from beginning 
to end, with adventurers — if Bonaparte himself was 
not the very prince of adventurers, then I do not 
know the meaning of the word — It Is necessary, for 
its proper understanding, to Interject here a paragraph 
or two of contemporaneous history. In 1800 Napoleon, 
whose fertile brain was planning the re-establishment 
in America of that French colonial empire which a 
generation before had been destroyed by England, 
persuaded the King of Spain, by the bribe of a petty 
Italian principality, to cede Louisiana to the French. 
But in the next three years things turned out so con- 
trary to his expectations that he was reluctantly com- 
pelled to abandon his scheme for colonial expansion 
and prepare for eventualities nearer home. The army 
he had sent to Haiti, and which he had intended to throw 



Adventurers All 5 

into Louisiana, had wasted away from disease and in 
battle with the blacks under the skilful leadership of 
L'Ouverture until but a pitiful skeleton remained. 

Meanwhile the attitude of England and Austria was 
steadily growing more hostile, and it did not need a 
telescope to see the war-clouds which heralded another 
great European struggle piling up on France's political 
horizon. Realizing that in the life-and-death struggle 
which was approaching, he could not be hampered with 
the defense of a distant colony, Napoleon decided that, 
if he was unable to hold Louisiana, he would at least 
put it out of the reach of his arch-enemy, England, by 
selling it to the United States. It was a master-stroke 
of diplomacy. Moreover, he needed money — needed it 
badly, too — for France, impoverished by the years of 
warfare from which she had just emerged, was ill pre- 
pared to embark on another struggle. 

There were in Paris at this time two Americans, 
Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe, who had been 
commissioned by President Jefferson to negotiate with 
the French Government for the purchase of the city of 
New Orleans and a small strip of territory adjacent to 
it, so that the settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee 
might have a free port on the gulf. After months 
spent in diplomatic intercourse, during which Talley- 
rand, the French foreign minister, could be induced 
neither to accept nor reject their proposals, the com- 
missioners were about ready to abandon the business in 
despair. I doubt, therefore, if there were two more 
astonished men in all Europe than the two Americans 
when Talleyrand abruptly asked them whether the 
United States would buy the whole of Louisiana and 
what price it would be willing to pay. It was as 



6 Some Forgotten Heroes 

though a man had gone to buy a cow and the owner 
had suddenly offered him his whole farm. 

Though astounded and embarrassed, for they had been 
authorized to spend but two million dollars in the con- 
templated purchase, the Americans had the courage 
to shoulder the responsibility of making so tremendous 
a transaction, for there was no time to communicate 
with Washington and no one realized better than they 
did that Louisiana must be purchased at once if it was 
to be had at all. England and France were, as they 
knew, on the very brink of war, and they also knew that 
the first thing England would do when war was declared 
would be to seize Louisiana, in which case it would be 
lost to the United States forever. This necessity for 
prompt action permitted of but little haggling over 
terms, and on May 22, 1803, Napoleon signed the treaty 
which transferred the million square miles comprised in 
the colony of Louisiana to the United States for fifteen 
million dollars. Nor was the sale effected an instant 
too soon, for on that very day England declared war. 

Now, in purchasing Louisiana, Jefferson, though he 
got the greatest bargain in history, found that the 
French had thrown in a boundary dispute to give good 
measure. The treaty did not specify the limits of the 
colony. 

"What are the boundaries of Louisiana?" Livingston 
asked Talleyrand when the treaty was being prepared. 

"I don't know," was the answer. "You must take 
it as we received it from Spain." 

"But what did you receive?" persisted the American. 

"I don't know," repeated the minister. "You are 
getting a noble bargain, monsieur, and you will doubtless 
make the best of it." 



Adventurers All 7 

As a matter of fact, Talleyrand was telling the literal 
truth (which must have been a novel experience for 
him) : he did not know. The boundaries of Louisiana had 
never been definitely established. It seems, indeed, to 
have come under the application of 

"The good old rule . . . the simple plan, 
That they shall take who have the power, '- 
And they shall keep who can." 

Hence, though American territory and Spanish 
marched side by side for twenty-five hundred miles, 
it was found impossible to agree on a definite line of 
demarcation, the United States claiming that its new 
purchase extended as far westward as the Sabine River, 
while Spain emphatically asserted that the Mississippi 
formed the dividing line. Along about 1806, however, 
a working arrangement was agreed upon, whereby 
American troops were not to move west of the Red 
River, while Spanish soldiers were not to go east of the 
Sabine. 

For the next fifteen years this arrangement remained 
in force, the strip of territory between these two rivers, 
which was known as the neutral ground, quickly be- 
coming a recognized place of refuge for fugitives from 
justice, bandits, desperadoes, adventurers, and bad 
men. To it, as though drawn by a magnet, flocked the 
adventure-hungry from every corner of the three Amer- 
icas. 

The vast territory beyond the Sabine, then known 
as New Spain and a few years later, when it had achieved 
its independence, as Mexico, was ruled from the distant 
City of Mexico in true Spanish style. Military rule 
held full sway; civil law was unknown. Foreigners 



8 Some Forgotten Heroes 

without passports were imprisoned; trading across the 
Sabine was prohibited; the Spanish officials were suspi- 
cious of every one. Because this trade was forbidden 
was the very thing that made it so attractive to the 
merchants of the frontier, while the grassy plains and 
fertile lowlands beyond the Sabine beckoned alluringly 
to the stock-raiser and the settler. And though there 
was just enough danger to attract them there was not 
enough strength to awe them. 

Jeering at governmental restrictions, Spanish and 
American alike, the frontiersmen began to pour across 
the Sabine into Texas in an ever-increasing stream. 
"Gone to Texas" was scrawled on the door of many a 
deserted cabin in Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky. 
On the Western river steamboats the officers' quarters 
on the hurricane-deck were called "the texas" because 
of their remoteness. "Go to Texas" became a slang 
phrase heard everywhere. 

It was felt to be beyond the natural limits of the world, 
and the glamour which hovered over this mysterious 
and forbidden land lured to its conquest the most 
picturesque and hardy breed of men that ever foreran 
the columns of civilization. A contempt for the Span- 
ish, a passion for adventure were the attitude of the 
people of our frontier as they strained impatiently 
against the Spanish boundaries. The American Gov- 
ernment had nothing to do with winning Texas for the 
American people. The American frontiersmen won 
Texas for themselves, unaided either by statesmen or 
by soldiers. 

Though these men wrote with their swords some of 
the most thrilling chapters in our history, their very 
existence has been ignored by most of our historians. 



Adventurers All 9 

Though they performed deeds of valor of which any 
people would have reason to be proud, it was in an un- 
official, shirt-sleeve sort of warfare, which the National 
Government neither authorized nor approved. Though 
they laid the foundations for adding an enormous terri- 
tory to our national domain, no monuments or memorials 
have been erected to them; even their names hold no 
significance for their countrymen of the present genera- 
tion. In short, they were filibusters, and that, in the 
eyes of those smug folk who believe that nothing can be 
meritorious that is done without the sanction of con- 
gresses and parliaments, completely damned them. 
They were American dreamers. Had they lived in the 
days of Cortes and Pizarro and Balboa, of Hawkins and 
Raleigh and Drake, history would have dealt more 
kindly with them. 

The free-lance leaders, who, during the first quarter 
of the nineteenth century made the neutral ground a 
synonym for hair-raising adventure and desperate dar- 
ing, were truly remarkable men. Five of them had held 
commissions in the army of the United States; one of 
them had commanded the French army sent to Ireland ; 
another was a peer of France and had led a division at 
Waterloo; others had won rank and distinction under 
Napoleon, Bolivar, and Jackson. 

The first of these adventurous spirits who for more 
than twenty years kept the Spanish and Mexican au- 
thorities in a fume of apprehension, was a young Ken- 
tuckian named Philip Nolan. He was the first Ameri- 
can explorer of Texas and the first man to publish a 
description of that region in the English language. He 
spent his boyhood in Frankfort, Kentucky, and as a 
young man turned up in New Orleans, then under 



lo Some Forgotten Heroes 

Spanish rule, having been, apparently, a person of con- 
siderable importance in the little city. Having heard 
rumors that immense droves of mustangs roamed the 
plains of Texas and seeing for himself that the Spanish 
troopers in Louisiana were badly in need of horses, he 
told the Spanish governor that if he would agree to 
purchase the animals from him at a fixed price per head 
and would give him a permit for the purpose, he would 
organize an expedition to capture wild horses in Texas 
and bring them back to New Orleans. 

The governor, who liked the young Kentuckian, 
promptly signed the contract, gave the permit, and 
Nolan, with a handful of companions, crossed the Sa- 
bine into Texas, corralled his horses, brought them to 
New Orleans, and was paid for them. It was a profit- 
able transaction for every one concerned. It was so 
successful that another year Nolan did it again. On 
the proceeds he went to Natchez, married the beauty of 
the town, and built a home. But along toward the close 
of 1800 the governor wanted remounts again, for the 
Spanish cavalrymen seemed incapable of taking even 
ordinary care of their horses. So Nolan, who was, I 
fancy, already growing a trifle weary of the tameness 
of domestic life, enlisted the services of a score of fron- 
tiersmen as adventure-loving as himself, kissed his bride 
of a year good-by, and, after showing his passports to 
the American border patrol and satisfying them that 
his venture had the approval of the Spanish authorities, 
once more crossed the Sabine into Texas. 

For a proper understanding of what occurred it is 
necessary to explain that, though Louisiana was under 
the jurisdiction of the Spanish Foreign Office (for this 
was before the province had been ceded to France), 



Adventurers All ii 

Texas was under the control of the Spanish Colonial 
Office. Between these two branches of the government 
the bitterest jealousy existed, and a passport issued by 
one was as likely as not to be disregarded by the other. 
In fact, the colonial officials were only too glad of an 
opportunity to humiliate and embarrass those connected 
with the Foreign Office. But Nolan and his men, ig- 
norant of this departmental jealousy and conscious that 
they were engaged in a perfectly innocent enterprise, 
went ahead with their business of capturing and break- 
ing horses. 

Crossing the Trinity, they found themselves on the 
edge of an immense rolling prairie which, as they ad- 
vanced, became more and more arid and forbidding. 
There were no trees, not even underbrush. The buffa- 
loes, though once numerous, had disappeared, and for 
nine days the little company had to subsist on the flesh 
of mustangs. They eventually reached the banks of 
the Brazos, however, where they found plenty of elk 
and deer, some bufifalo, and "wild horses by thousands." 
Establishing a camp upon the present site of Waco, they 
built a stockade and captured and corralled three hun- 
dred head of horses. 

While lounging about the camp-fire one night, telling 
the stories and singing the songs of the frontier and 
thinking, no doubt, of the folks at home, a force of one 
hundred and fifty Spaniards, commanded by Don 
Nimesio Salcedo, commandant-general of the north- 
eastern provinces, creeping up under cover of the dark- 
ness, succeeded in surrounding the unsuspecting Ameri- 
cans, who, warned of the proximity of strangers by the 
restlessness of their horses, retreated into a square en- 
closure of logs which they had built as a protection 



12 Some Forgotten Heroes 

against an attack by Indians. At daybreak the Span- 
iards opened fire, and Nolan fell with a bullet through 
his brain. 

The command of the expedition then devolved upon 
Ellis P. Bean, a boy of seventeen, who, from the scanty 
shelter of the log pen, continued a resistance that was 
hopeless from the first. Every one of the Americans was 
a dead shot and at fifty paces could hit a dollar held 
between a man's fingers, but they were vastly outnum- 
bered, they were unprovisioned for a siege, and, as a 
final discouragement, the Spaniards now brought up a 
swivel-gun and opened on them with grape. Bean 
urged his men to follow him in an attempt to capture 
this field-piece. "It's nothing more than death, boys," 
he told them, "and if we stay here we shall be killed 
anyway." But his men were falling dead about him as 
he spoke, and the eleven left alive decided that their 
only chance, and that was slim enough, Heaven knows, 
lay in an immediate retreat. 

Filling their powder-horns and bullet-pouches and 
loading the balance of their ammunition on the back of 
a negro slave named Caesar, they started off across the 
prairie on their hopeless march, the Spaniards hanging 
to the flanks of the little party as wolves hang to the 
flank of a dying steer. All that day they plodded east- 
ward under the broiling sun, bringing down with their 
unerring rifles those Spaniards who were incautious 
enough to venture within range. But at last they 
were forced, by lack of food and water, to accept the 
ofl"er of the Spanish commander to permit them to re- 
turn to the United States unharmed if they would sur- 
render and promise not to enter Texas again. 

No sooner had they given up their arms, however. 



Adventurers All 13 

than the Spaniards, afraid no longer, put their prisoners 
in irons and marched them off to San Antonio, where 
they were kept in prison for three months; then to San 
Luis Potosi, where they were confined for sixteen months 
more, eventually being forwarded, still in irons, to 
Chihuahua, where, in January, 1804, they were tried 
by a Spanish court, were defended by a Spanish lawyer, 
were acquitted, and the judge ordered their release. 
But Salcedo, who had become the governor of the prov- 
ince, determined that the hated gringos should not thus 
easily escape, countermanded the findings of the court, 
and forwarded the papers in the case to the King of 
Spain. 

The King, by a decree issued in February, 1807, after 
these innocent Americans had already been captives for 
nearly seven years, ordered that one out of every five 
of them should be hung, and the rest put at hard labor 
for ten years. But when the decree reached Chihuahua 
there were only nine prisoners left, two of them having 
died from the hardships to which they had been sub- 
jected. Under the circumstances the judge, who was 
evidently a man of some compassion, construed the 
decree as meaning that only one of the remaining nine 
should be put to death. 

On the morning of the 9th of November, 1807, a party 
of Spanish officials proceeded to the barracks where the 
Americans were confined and an officer read the King's 
barbarous decree. A drum was brought, a tumbler 
and dice were set upon it, and around it, blindfolded, 
knelt the nine participants in this lottery of death. Some 
day, no doubt, when time has accorded these men the 
justice of perspective, Texas will commission a famous 
artist to paint the scene: the turquoise sky, the yellow 



14 Some Forgotten Heroes 

sand, the sun glare on the whitewashed adobe of the 
barrack walls, the little, brown-skinned soldiers in their 
soiled and slovenly uniforms, the Spanish officers, gor- 
geous in scarlet and gold lace, awed in spite of them- 
selves by the solemnity of the occasion, and, kneeling 
in a circle about the drum, in their frayed and tattered 
buckskin, the prison pallor on their faces, the nine 
Americans — cool, composed, and unafraid. 

Ephraim Blackburn, a Virginian and the oldest of the prisoners, 
took the fatal glass and with a hand which did not tremble — 
though I imagine that he whispered a little prayer — threw 

3 and I 4 

Lucian Garcia threw 3 and 4 7 

Joseph Reed threw 6 and 5 11 

David Fero threw 5 and 3 8 

Solomon Cooley threw 6 and 5 11 

Jonah Walters threw 6 and 1 7 

Charles Ring threw 4 and 3 7 

William Dawlin threw 4 and 2 6 

Ellis Bean threw 4 and i 5 

Whereupon they took poor Ephraim Blackburn out and 
hanged him. 

After Blackburn's execution three of the remaining 
prisoners were set at liberty, but Bean, with four of his 
companions, all heavily ironed, were started off under 
guard for Mexico City. Any one who questions the 
assertion that fact is stranger than fiction will change 
his mind after hearing of Bean's subsequent adventures. 
They read like the wildest and most improbable of dime 
novels. When the prisoners reached Salamanca a 
young and strikingly beautiful woman, evidently at- 
tracted by Bean's youth and magnificent physique, 



Adventurers All 15 

managed to approach him unobserved and asked him 
in a whisper if he did not wish to escape. (As if, after 
his years of captivity and hardship, he could have wished 
otherwise !) Then she disappeared as silently and mys- 
teriously as she had come. 

The next day the sefiora, who, as it proved, was the 
girl wife of a rich old husband, by bribing the guard, 
contrived to see Bean again. She told him quite frankly 
that her husband, whom she had been forced to marry 
against her will, was absent at his silver-mines, and sug- 
gested that, if Bean would promise not to desert her, she 
would find means to effect his escape and that they 
could then fly together to the United States, It shows 
the manner of man this American adventurer was that, 
on the plea that he could not desert his companions in 
misfortune, he declined her offer. The next day, as 
the prisoners once again took up their weary march to 
the southward, the sefiora slipped into Bean's hand a 
small package. When an opportunity came for him to 
open it he found that it contained a letter from his fair 
admirer, a gold ring, and a considerable sum of money. 

Instead of being released upon their arrival at the 
City of Mexico, as they had been led to expect, the 
Americans were marched to Acapulco, on the Pacific, 
then a port of great importance because of its trade with 
the Philippines. Here Bean was placed in solitary 
confinement, the only human beings he saw for many 
months being the jailer who brought him his scanty 
daily allowance of food and the sentry who paced up 
and down outside his cell. Had it not been for a white 
lizard which he found in his dungeon and which, with 
incredible patience, he succeeded in taming, he would 
have gone mad from the intolerable solitude. Learn- 



1 6 Some Forgotten Heroes 

ing from the sentinel that one of his companions had 
been taken ill and had been transferred to the hospital, 
Bean, who was a resourceful fellow, prepared his pulse 
by striking his elbows on the floor and then sent for the 
prison doctor. 

Though he was sent to the hospital, as he had antici- 
pated, not only were his irons not removed but his 
legs were placed in stocks, and, on the theory that eat- 
ing is not good for a sick man, his allowance of food was 
greatly reduced, his meat for a day consisting of the 
head of a chicken. When Bean remonstrated with the 
priest over the insufficient nourishment he was receiv- 
ing, the padre told him that if he wasn't satisfied with 
what he was getting he could go to the devil. Where- 
upon, his anger overpowering his judgment. Bean 
hurled his plate at the friar's shaven head and laid it 
open. For this he was punished by having his head 
put in the stocks, in an immovable position, for fifteen 
days. When he recovered from the real fever which 
this barbarous punishment brought on, he was only too 
glad to go back to the solitude of his cell and his friend 
the lizard. 

While being taken back to prison. Bean, who had 
succeeded in concealing on his person the money which 
the sefiora in Salamanca had given him, suggested to 
his guards that they stop at a tavern and have some- 
thing to drink. A Spaniard never refuses a drink, and 
they accepted. So skilfully did he ply them with liquor 
that one of them fell into a drunken stupor while the 
other became so befuddled that Bean found no diffi- 
culty in enticing him into the garden at the back of the 
tavern on the plea that he wished to show him a certain 
flower. As the man was bending over to examine the 



Adventurers All 17 

plant to which Bean had called his attention, the Ameri- 
can leaped upon his back and choked him into uncon- 
sciousness. 

Heavily manacled though he was, Bean succeeded 
in clambering over the high wall and escaped to the 
woods outside the city, where he filed off his irons with 
the steel he used for striking fire. Concealing himself 
until nightfall, he slipped into the town again, where 
he found an English sailor who, upon hearing his pitiful 
story, smuggled him aboard his vessel and concealed 
him in a water-cask. But, just as the anchor was being 
hoisted and he believed himself free at last, a party of 
Spanish soldiers boarded the vessel and hauled him out 
of his hiding-place — he had been betrayed by the Portu- 
guese cook. For this attempt at escape he was sen- 
tenced to eighteen months more of solitary confinement. 

One day, happening to overhear an officer speaking 
of having some rock blasted. Bean sent word to him 
that he was an expert at that business, whereupon he 
was taken out and put to work. Before he had been in 
the quarry a week he succeeded in once more making 
his escape. Travelling by night and hiding by day, 
he beat his way up the coast, only to be retaken some 
weeks later. When he was brought before the governor 
of Acapulco that official went into a paroxysm of rage 
at sight of the American whose iron will he had been 
unable to break either by imprisonment or torture. 

Bean, who had reached such a stage of desperation 
that he didn't care what happened to him, looking the 
governor squarely in the eye, told him, in terms which 
seared and burned, exactly what he thought of him and 
defied him to do his worst. That official, at his wits* 
end to know how to subdue the unruly American, gave 



1 8 Some Forgotten Heroes 

orders that he was to be chained to a gigantic mulatto, 
the most dangerous criminal in the prison, the latter 
being promised a year's reduction in his sentence if he 
would take care of his yokemate, whom he was author- 
ized to punish as frequently as he saw fit. But the 
punishing was the other way around, for Bean pom- 
melled the big negro so terribly that the latter sent word 
to the governor that he would rather have his sentence 
increased than to be longer chained to the mad Ameri- 
cano. 

By this time Bean had every one in the castle, from 
the governor to the lowest warder, completely terror- 
ized, for they recognized that he was desperate and 
would stop at nothing. He was, in fact, such a hard 
case that the governor of Acapulco wrote to the viceroy 
that he could do nothing with him and begged to be 
relieved of his dangerous prisoner. The latter, in reply, 
sent an order for his removal to the Spanish penal settle- 
ment in the Philippines. But while awaiting a vessel 
the revolt led by Morelos, the Mexican patriot, broke 
out, and a rebel army advanced on Acapulco. The 
prisons of New Spain had been emptied to obtain re- 
cruits to fill the Spanish ranks, and Bean was the only 
prisoner left in the citadel. The Spanish authorities, 
desperately in need of men, offered him his liberty if 
he would help to defend the town. Bean agreed, his 
irons were knocked off, he was given a gun, and became 
a soldier. But he felt that he owed no loyalty to his 
Spanish captors; so, when an opportunity presented 
itself a few weeks later, he went over to Morelos, tak- 
ing with him a number of the garrison. 

A born soldier, hard as nails, amazingly resourceful 
and brave to the point of rashness, he quickly won the 



Adventurers All 19 

confidence and friendship of the patriot leader, who 
commissioned him a colonel in the Republican army. 
When Morelos left Acapulco to continue his campaign 
in the south, he turned the command of the besieging 
forces over to the ex-convict, who, a few weeks later, 
carried the city by storm. It must have been a proud 
moment for the American adventurer, not yet thirty 
years of age, when he stood in the plaza of the captured 
city and received the sword of the governor who had 
treated him with such fiendish cruelty.* 

When the story of the treatment of Nolan and his 
companions trickled back to the settlements and was 
repeated from village to village and from house to 
house, every repetition served to fan the flame of hatred 
of everything Spanish, which grew fiercer and fiercer 
in the Southwest as the years rolled by. From the 
horror and indignation aroused along the frontier by 
the treatment of these men, whom the undiscerning 
historians have unjustly described as filibusters, sprang 
that movement which ended, a quarter of a century 
later, in freeing Texas forever from the cruelties of 
Latin rule. Thus it came about that Nolan and his 
companions did not die in vain. 

* In 1814 Bean was sent by General Morelos, then president of the revolu- 
tionary party in Mexico, on a mission to the United States to procure aid for 
the patriot cause. At the port of Nautla he found a vessel belonging to Lafitte, 
an account of whose exploits will be found in "The Pirate Who Turned Patriot," 
which conveyed him to the headquarters of the pirate chief, at Barataria. Upon 
informing Lafitte of his mission, the buccaneer had him conveyed to New Or- 
leans, where Bean found an old acquaintance in General Andrew Jackson, upon 
whose invitation he took command of one of the batteries on the 8th of January 
and fought by the side of Lafitte in that battle. Colonel Bean eventually rose 
to high rank under the Mexican republic, married a Mexican heiress, and died 
on her hacienda near Jalapa in 1846. 



WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET'S POWER 



Sometimes a mere incident may influence profoundly 
the turn of history in ways impossible at the time to fore- 
tell. In 1811 a battle with the Indians on the banks of 
the Wabash River, at that time the outermost picket-line 
of American civilization, started a chain of circumstances 
which ended in the downfall of Napoleon; launched the 
youthful territorial governor, William Henry Harrison, 
on the road to the presidency; broke the power of the 
Indian Confederacy which under Tecumseh stood as a 
barrier to the advance of white settlements in Indiana; 
and pushed forward a quarter of a century the develop- 
ment of our West. 



WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET'S POWER 

It is a curious and interesting fact that, just as in the 
year 1 754 a colHsion between French and EngHsh scout- 
ing parties on the banks of the Youghiogheny River, 
deep in the American wilderness, began a war that 
changed the map of Europe, so in 181 1 a battle on the 
banks of the Wabash between Americans and Indians 
started an avalanche which ended by crushing Napoleon. 
The nineteenth century was still in its infancy at the 
time this story opens; the war of the Revolution had 
been over barely a quarter of a century, and a second 
war with England was shortly to begin. Though the 
borders of the United States nominally extended to the 
Rockies, the banks of the Mississippi really marked the 
outermost picket-line of civilization. 

Beyond that lay a vast and virgin wilderness, incon- 
ceivably rich in minerals, game, and timber, but still 
in the power of more or less hostile tribes of Indians. 
Up to 1800 the whole of that region lying beyond the 
Ohio, including the present States of Indiana, Illinois, 
Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Missouri, was officially 
designated as the Northwest Territory, but in that year 
the northern half of this region was organized as the 
Indian Territory or, as it came to be known in time, the 
Territory of Indiana. 

The governor of this great province was a young man 
named William Henry Harrison. This youth — he was 
only twenty-seven at the time of his appointment — was 

23 



24 Some Forgotten Heroes 

Invested with one of the most extraordinary commis- 
sions ever issued by our government. In addition to 
being the governor of a Territory whose area was greater 
than that of the German Empire, he was commander- 
in-chief of the Territorial mihtia, Indian agent, land 
commissioner, and sole lawgiver. He had the power 
to adopt from the statutes upon the books of any of the 
States any and every law which he deemed applica- 
ble to the needs of the Territory. He appointed all 
the judges and other civil officials and all military offi- 
cers below the rank of general. He possessed and exer- 
cised the authority to divide the Territory into counties 
and townships. He held the prerogative of pardon. 
His decision as to the validity of existing land grants, 
many of which were technically worthless, was final, 
and his signature upon a title was a remedy for all de- 
fects. As the representative of the United States in its 
relations with the Indians, he held the power to nego- 
tiate treaties and to make treaty payments. 

Governor Harrison was admittedly the highest au- 
thority on the northwestern Indians. He kept his 
fingers constantly on the pulse of Indian sentiment and 
opinion and often said that he could forecast by the 
conduct of his Indians, as a mariner forecasts the weather 
by the aid of a barometer, the chances of war and peace 
for the United States so far as they were controlled by 
the cabinet in London. The remark, though curious, 
was not surprising. Uneasiness would naturally be 
greatest in regions where the greatest irritation existed 
and which were under the least control. 

Such a danger spot was the Territory of Indiana. It 
occupied a remote and perilous position, for northward 
and westward the Indian country stretched to the Great 



When We Smashed the Prophet's Power 25 

Lakes and the Mississippi, unbroken save by the mili- 
tary posts at Fort Wayne and Fort Dearborn (now 
Chicago) and a considerable settlement of whites in the 
vicinity of Detroit. Some five thousand Indian warriors 
held this vast region and would have been abundantly 
able to expel every white man from Indiana had their or- 
ganization been as strong as their numbers. And the 
whites were no less eager to expel the Indians. 

During the first decade of the nineteenth century 
there was really no perfect peace with any of the Indian 
tribes west of the Ohio, and Harrison's abilities as a 
soldier and a diplomatist were taxed to the utmost to 
prevent the skirmish-line, as the chain of settlements 
and trading-posts which marked our westernmost 
frontier might well be called, from being turned into a 
battle-ground. Harrison's most formidable opponent 
in his task of civilizing the West was the Shawnee chief- 
tain Tecumseh, perhaps the most remarkable of Ameri- 
can Indians. 

Though not a chieftain by birth, Tecumseh had risen 
by the strength of his personality and his powers as an 
orator to a position of altogether extraordinary influence 
and power among his people. So great was his repu- 
tation for bravery in battle and wisdom in council that 
by 1809 he had attained the unique distinction of being, 
to all intents and purposes, the political leader of all 
the Indians between the Ohio and the Mississippi. 

With the vision of a prophet, Tecumseh saw that if 
this immense territory was once opened to settlement 
by whites the game upon which the Indians had to de- 
pend for sustenance must soon be exterminated and 
that in a few years his people would have to move to 
strange and distant hunting-grounds. Taking this as 



26 Some Forgotten Heroes 

his text, he preached a gospel of armed resistance to 
the white man's encroachments at every tribal council- 
fire from the land of the Chippewas to the country of 
the Creeks. 

Throughout his campaign of proselytism Tecumseh 
was ably seconded by one of his triplet brothers, Elkswa- 
tana, known among the Indians as "the Prophet." 
The latter, profiting by the credulity and superstition 
of the red men, obtained a great reputation as a medicine- 
man and seer by means of his charms, incantations, and 
pretended visions of the Great Spirit, thus making him- 
self a most valuable ally of Tecumseh in the great con- 
spiracy which the latter was secretly hatching. Mean- 
while the relations between the Americans and their 
neighbors across the Canadian border had become 
strained almost to the breaking point, the situation 
being aggravated by the fact that the British were se- 
cretly encouraging Tecumseh in spreading his propa- 
ganda of resistance to the United States and were cov- 
ertly supplying the Indians with arms and ammunition 
for the purpose. 

The winter of 1809-10, therefore, was marked by 
Indian outrages along the whole length of the frontier. 
And there were other agencies, more remote but none the 
less effective, at work creating discontent among the 
Indians. It seems a far cry from the prairies to the 
Tuileries, from an Indian warrior to a French Emperor, 
but when Napoleon's decree of what was virtually a 
universal blockade imposed terrible hardships on Ameri- 
can shipping as well as on the British commerce at which 
it was aimed, even the savage of the wilderness was 
affected. It clogged and almost closed the chief markets 
for his furs, and prices dropped so low that Indian 



When We Smashed the Prophet'' s Power 27 

hunters were hardly able to purchase the powder and 
shot with which to kill their game. At the beginning 
of 1 8 10, therefore, the Indians were ripe for any enter- 
prise that promised them relief and independence. 

In the spring of 1808 Tecumseh, the Prophet, and their 
followers had established themselves on the banks of the 
Wabash, near the mouth of the Tippecanoe River, about 
seven miles to the north of the present site of Lafayette, 
Indiana. Strategically, the situation was admirably 
chosen, for Vincennes, where Harrison had his head- 
quarters, lay one hundred and fifty miles below and 
could be reached in four and twenty hours by canoe 
down the Wabash; Fort Dearborn was a hundred miles 
to the northwest; Fort Wayne the same distance to the 
northeast; and, barring a short portage, the Indians 
could paddle their canoes to Detroit in one direction or 
to any part of the Ohio or the Mississippi in the other. 
Thus they were within striking distance of the chief 
military posts on the frontier and within easy reach of 
their British friends at Maiden. 

On this spot the Indians, in obedience to a command 
which the Prophet professed to have received in a dream 
from the Great Spirit, built a sort of model village, 
where they assiduously tilled the soil and shunned the 
fire-water of the whites. For a year or more after the 
establishment of Prophet's Town, as the place was 
called, things went quietly enough, but when it became 
known that Harrison had obtained the cession of the 
three million acres in the valley of the Wabash already 
referred to, the smouldering resentment of Tecumseh 
and his followers was fanned into flame, the Indians re- 
fusing to receive the "annuity salt" sent them in ac- 
cordance with the terms of the treaty and threatened to 



28 Some Forgotten Heroes 

kill the boatmen who brought it, whom they called 
"American dogs." 

Early in the following summer Harrison sent word 
to Tecumseh that he would like to see him, and on 
August 12, 1810, the Indian chief with four hundred 
armed warriors arrived at the governor's headquarters 
at Vincennes. The meeting between the white man who 
stood for civilization and the red man who stood for 
savagery took place in a field outside the stockaded 
town. The youthful governor, short of stature, lean of 
body, and stern of face, sat in a chair under a spreading 
tree, surrounded by a group of his officials: army officers, 
Territorial judges, scouts, interpreters, and agents. 
Opposite him, ranged in a semicircle on the ground, 
were Tecumseh, his brother, the Prophet, and a score 
or more of chiefs, while back of them, row after row of 
blanketed forms and grim, bepainted faces, sat his 
four hundred fighting men. 

Tecumseh had been warned that his braves must 
come to the conference unarmed, and to all appearances 
they were weaponless, but no one knew better than 
Harrison that concealed beneath the folds of each 
warrior's blanket was a tomahawk and a scalping-knife. 
Nor, aware as he was of the danger of Indian treachery, 
had he neglected to take precautions, for the garrison 
of the town was under arms, the muzzles of field-guns 
peered through apertures in the log stockade, and a few 
paces away from the council, ready to open fire at the 
first sign of danger, were a score of soldiers with loaded 
rifles. In reply to Harrison's formal greeting, Tecum- 
seh rose to his feet, presenting a most striking and im- 
pressive figure as he stood, drawn to his full height, with 
folded arms and granite features, the sunlight playing 




After a painting by Stanley M. Arthurs. 



William Henry Harrison's conferences with Tecumseh at 
Vincennes, Indiana. 



When We Smashed the Prophets Power 29 

on his copper-colored skin, on his belt and moccasins of 
beaded buckskin, and on the single eagle's feather which 
slanted in his hdir. 

The address of the famous warrior statesman con- 
sisted of a recital of the wrongs which the Indian had 
suffered at the hands of the white man. It was a story 
of chicanery and spoliation and oppression which Tecum- 
seh told, and those who listened to it, white men and 
red alike, knew that it was very largely true. He told 
how the Indians, the real owners of the land, had been 
steadily driven westward and ever westward, first be- 
yond the Alleghanies, and then beyond the Ohio, and 
now beyond the Missouri. He told how the white men 
had attempted to create dissension among the Indians 
to prevent their uniting, how they had bribed the 
stronger tribes and coerced the weaker, how again and 
again they had tried to goad the Indians into committing 
some overt act that they might use it as an excuse for 
seizing more of their land. He told how the whites, 
jeering at the sacredness of treaty obligations, system- 
atically debauched the Indians by selling them whis- 
key; how they trespassed on the Indians' lands and 
slaughtered the game on which the Indians depended 
for support; of how, when the Indians protested, they 
were often slaughtered, too; and of how the white men's 
courts, instead of condemning the criminal, usually 
ended by congratulating him. He declared that things 
had come to a pass where the Indians must fight or 
perish, that the Indians were one people and that the 
lands belonging to them as a race could not be disposed 
of by individual tribes, that an Indian confederacy had 
been formed which both could and would fight every 
step of the white man's further advance. 



3© Some Forgotten Heroes 

As Tecumseh continued, his pronunciation became 
more guttural, his terms harsher, his gestures more 
excited, his argument changed into a warlike harangue. 
He played upon the Indian portion of his audience as a 
maestro plays upon a violin, until, their passions mas- 
tering their discretion, they sprang to their feet with a 
whoop, brandishing their tomahawks and knives. In 
the flutter of an eyelash everything was in confusion. 
The waiting soldiers dashed forward like sprinters, 
cocking their rifles as they ran. The ofhcers jerked 
loose their swords, and the frontiersmen snatched up 
their long-barrelled weapons. But Harrison was quick- 
est of all, for, drawing and cocking a pistol with a single 
motion, he thrust its muzzle squarely into Tecumseh's 
face. "Call ofif your men," he thundered, "or you're a 
dead Indian!" Tecumseh, realizing that he had over- 
played his part and appreciating that this was an oc- 
casion when discretion was of more avail than valor, 
motioned to his warriors, and they silently and sullenly 
withdrew. 

But it was no part of Tecumseh's plan or that of the 
British who were behind him to bring on a war at this 
time, when their preparations were as yet incomplete; so 
the following morning Tecumseh, who had little to learn 
about the game of diplomacy, called on Harrison, ex- 
pressed with apparent sincerity his regret for the vio- 
lence into which his young men had been led by his 
words, and asked to have the council resumed. Harri- 
son well knew the great ability and influence of Tecum- 
seh and was anxious to conciliate him, for, truth to tell, 
the Americans were no more prepared for war at this 
time than were the Indians. 

When asked whether he intended to persist in his 



When We Smashed the Prophet's Power 31 

opposition to the cessions of territory in the valley of 
the Wabash, Tecumseh firmly asserted his intention to 
adhere to the old boundary, though he made it clear 
that, if the governor would prevail upon the President 
to give up the lands in question and would agree never 
to make another treaty without the consent of all the 
tribes, he would pledge himself to be a faithful ally of 
the United States. Otherwise he would be obliged to 
enter into an alliance with the English. Harrison told 
him that the American Government would never agree 
to his suggestions. "Well," rejoined Tecumseh, as 
though he had expected the answer he received, "as 
the Great Chief is to decide the matter, I hope the 
Great Spirit will put sense enough into his head to in- 
duce him to direct you to give up the land. True, he 
is so far off that he will not be injured by the war. It 
is you and I who will have to fight it out while he sits 
in his town and drinks his wine." 

It only needed this open declaration of his hostile in- 
tentions by Tecumseh to convince Harrison that the 
time had come to strike, and strike hard. If the peril 
of the great Indian league of which Tecumseh had 
boasted was to be averted, it must be done before that 
confederation became too strongly organized to shatter. 
There was no time to be lost. Harrison promptly issued 
a call for volunteers to take part in a campaign against 
the Indians, at the same time despatching a messenger 
to Washington requesting the loan of a regiment of 
regulars to stiffen the raw levies who would compose 
the major part of the expedition. News of Harrison's 
call for men spread over the frontier States as though 
disseminated by wireless, and soon the volunteers came 
pouring in: frontiersmen from Kentucky and Tennessee 



32 Some Forgotten Heroes 

in fur caps and hunting-shirts of buckskin; woodsmen 
from the forests of Michigan and Wisconsin, long- 
barrelled rifles on their shoulders and powder-horns 
slung from their necks; militiamen from Indiana and 
Illinois, and grizzled Indian-fighters from the towns 
along the river and the backwoods settlements, who 
volunteered as much from love of fighting as from hatred 
of the Indians. 

Then, one day, almost before Harrison realized that 
they had started, a column of dusty, footsore soldiery 
came tramping into Vincennes with the unmistakable 
swing of veterans. It was the 4th Regiment of United 
States Infantry, commanded by Colonel John Parker 
Boyd, who, upon receiving orders from Washington 
to hurry to Harrison's assistance, had put his men on 
fiatboats at Pittsburg, where the regiment was stationed, 
floated them down to the falls of the Ohio, and marched 
them overland to Harrison's headquarters at Vincennes, 
accomplishing the four-hundred-mile journey in a time 
which made that veteran frontiersman open his eyes 
with astonishment when he heard it. 

Boyd was one of the most picturesque figures which 
our country has ever produced. Born in Newburyport 
in 1764, the last British soldier had left our shores be- 
fore he was old enough to realize the ambition of his 
life by obtaining a commission in the American army. 
But his was not the disposition which could content it- 
self with the tedium of garrison life in time of peace; 
so, before he had passed his four-and- twentieth birth- 
day he had handed in his papers and taken passage for 
India. Entering the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad, 
he rose to the command of a cavalry division, eventually 
resigning from the Nizam's service to organize an army 



When We Smashed the Prophet's Power 33 

of his own. The horses, elephants, and guns were his 
personal property, and he rented his army to those 
native princes who stood in need of its services and were 
able to pay for them, very much as a garage rents an 
automobile. 

Foreseeing, however, the eventual conquest of India 
by the British and realizing that it would mean the 
end of independent soldiering in that country, he sold 
his army, elephants and all, to an Italian soldier of for- 
tune and turned his face toward his native land once 
more. At that time soldiering was neither a very popu- 
lar nor a very profitable profession in the United States, 
so that Boyd, whose reputation as a daring leader and a 
rigid disciplinarian had preceded him, had no difficulty 
in again obtaining a commission under his own flag 
and in the service of his own country, being offered by 
the government and promptly accepting the colonelcy 
of the 4th Regiment of Foot. An October evening in 
181 1, then, saw him riding into Vincennes at the head 
of his travel-weary regulars, in response to Governor 
Harrison's request for reinforcements. 

The news brought in by the scouts that war-dances 
were going on in the Indian villages and that the threat- 
ened storm was about to break served to hasten Harri- 
son's preparations. The small, but exceedingly busi- 
nesslike, expedition which marched out of Vincennes on 
the 1st day of November under the leadership of Gover- 
nor Harrison, with Colonel Boyd in direct command 
of the troops, consisted of the nine companies of regulars 
which Boyd had brought from Pittsburg, six companies 
of infantry of the Indiana militia, two companies of 
Indiana dragoons, two companies of Kentucky mounted 
rifles, a company of Indiana mounted rifles, and a com- 



34 Some Forgotten Heroes 

pany of scouts — about eleven hundred men in all. 
Their uniforms would have looked strange and outland- 
ish indeed to one accustomed to the serviceable, dust- 
colored garb of the present-day soldier, for the infantry 
wore high felt hats of the "stovepipe" pattern, adorned 
with red-white-and-blue cockades, tight-waisted, long- 
tailed coats of blue cloth with brass buttons, and panta- 
loons as nearly skin-tight as the tailor could make them. 
The dragoons were gorgeous in white buckskin breeches, 
high, varnished boots, "shell" jackets which reached 
barely to the hips, and brass helmets with streaming 
plumes of horsehair. Because the mounted riflemen 
who were under the command of Captain Spencer wore 
gray uniforms lavishly trimmed with yellow, they bore 
the nickname among the troops of "Spencer's Yellow- 
Jackets." The only men of the force, indeed, who were 
suitably clad for Indian warfare were the scouts, who 
wore the hunting-shirts, leggings, and moccasins of 
soft-tanned buckskin, which were the orthodox dress of 
the frontier. 

Commanded by men of such wide experience in savage 
warfare as Harrison and Boyd, it is needless to say that 
every precaution was taken against surprise, the col- 
umn moving in a formation which prepared it for in- 
stant battle. The cavalry formed advance and rear 
guards, and small detachments rode on either flank; 
the infantry marched in two columns, one on either side 
of the trail, with the baggage- wagons, pack-animals, 
and beeves between them, while the scouts, thrown far 
out into the forest, formed a moving cordon of skir- 
mishers. After crossing the Vermilion River the troops 
found themselves upon an immense prairie, which 
stretched away, level as a floor, as far as the eye could 



When We Smashed the Prophet's Power 35 

see — as far as the Illinois at Fort Dearborn, the guides 
asserted. It filled the soldiers, who came from a rugged 
and heavily forested country, with the greatest astonish- 
ment, for few of them had ever seen so vast an expanse 
of level ground before. Shortly afterward, however, they 
left the prairie and marched through open woods, over 
ground gashed and furrowed by deep ravines. Here 
the greatest precautions had to be observed, for clouds 
of Indian scouts hung upon the flanks of the column, 
and the broken nature of the country fitted it admirably 
for ambushes. 

Late in the afternoon of November 6, 181 1, in a cold 
and drizzling rain, Harrison gave orders to bivouac 
for the night on a piece of high but swamp-surrounded 
ground on the banks of the Tippecanoe River, near its 
junction with the Wabash, and barely five miles from 
Prophet's Town. It was a triangular-shaped knoll, 
dotted with oaks, one side of which dropped down in a 
sharp declivity to a little stream edged with willows and 
heavy underbrush, while the other two sides sloped 
down more gradually to a marshy prairie. The camp 
was arranged in the form of an irregular parallelogram, 
with the regulars — who were the only seasoned troops in 
the expedition — forming the front and rear, the flanks 
being composed of mounted riflemen supported by mili- 
tia, while two troops of dragoons were held in reserve. 
In the centre of this armed enclosure were parked the 
pack-animals and the baggage- train. Though late in 
the night the moon rose from behind a bank of clouds, 
the night was very dark, with occasional flurries of 
rain. The troops lay on the rain-soaked ground with 
rifles loaded and bayonets fixed, but they slept but little, 
I fancy, for they had brought no tents, few of them were 



36 Some Forgotten Heroes 

provided with blankets, and top-hats and tail-coats 
are not exactly adapted to camping in the forest in 
November. 

From his experience In previous campaigns, Harrison 
had learned that, while in the vicinity of any con- 
siderable body of Indians, it was the part of precaution 
to arouse his men quietly an hour or so before daybreak, 
for it was a characteristic of the Indians to deliver their 
attacks shortly before the dawn, which is the hour when 
tired men sleep the soundest. Meanwhile, in the Indian 
camp preparations were being stealthily made for the 
surprise and extermination of the white invaders. 

Tecumseh was not present, being absent on one of his 
proselyting tours among the southern tribes, but the 
Prophet brought out the sacred torch and the magic 
beans, which his followers had only to touch, so he as- 
sured them, to become invulnerable to the enemy's 
bullets. This ceremony was followed by a series of 
incantations, war songs, and dances, until the Indians, 
now wrought up to a frenzy, were ready for any deed of 
madness. Slipping like horrid phantoms through the 
waist-high prairie grass in the blackness of the night, they 
crept nearer and nearer to the sleeping camp, intending to 
surround the position, stab the sentries, rush the camp, 
and slaughter every man in it whom they could not 
take alive for the torture stake. 

In pursuance of his custom of early rising, Harrison 
was just pulling on his boots before the embers of a 
dying camp-fire, at four o'clock in the morning, prepara- 
tory to rousing his men, when the silence of the forest 
was suddenly broken by the crack of a sentry's rifle. 
The echoes had not time to die away before, from three 
sides of the camp, rose the shrill, hair-raising war-whoop 



When We Smashed the Prophet'' s Power 37 

of the Indians. As familiar with the lay of the land as 
a housewife is with the arrangements of her kitchen, 
they had effected their plan of surrounding the camp, 
confident of taking the suddenly awakened soldiers so 
completely by surprise that they would be unable to 
offer an effectual resistance. Not a warrior of them but 
did not look forward to returning to Prophet's Town 
with a string of dripping scalp-locks at his waist. 

The Indians, quite unlike their usual custom of keep- 
ing to cover, fought as white men fight, for, made reck- 
less by the prophet's assurances that his spells had made 
them invulnerable and that bullets could not harm 
them, they advanced across the open at a run. At 
sight of the oncoming wave of bedaubed and befeathered 
figures the raw levies from Indiana and Kentucky 
visibly wavered and threatened to give way, but Boyd's 
regulars, though taken by surprise, showed the result of 
their training by standing like a stone wall against the 
onset of the whooping redskins. The engagement 
quickly became general. The chorus of cheers and yells 
and groans and war-whoops was punctuated by the con- 
tinuous crackle of the frontiersmen's rifles and the crash- 
ing volleys of the infantry. Harrison, a conspicuous 
figure on a white horse and wearing a white blanket coat, 
rode up and down the lines, encouraging here, caution- 
ing there, as cool and as quiet-voiced as though back on 
the parade-ground at Vincennes. 

The pressure was greatest at the angle of the camp 
where the first attack was made, the troops stationed 
at this point having the greatest difficulty in holding 
their position. Seeing this, Major Joseph H. Daviess, 
a brilliant but hot-headed young Kentuckian who had 
achieved fame by his relentless attacks on Aaron Burr, 



38 Some Forgotten Heroes 

twice asked permission to charge with his dragoons, 
and twice the governor sent back the answer: "Tell 
Major Daviess to be patient; he shall have his chance 
before the battle is over." When Daviess for a third 
time urged his importunate request, Harrison answered 
the messenger sharply: "Tell Major Daviess he has twice 
heard my opinion; he may now use his own discretion." 
Discretion, however, was evidently not included in 
the Kentuckian's make-up, for no sooner had he re- 
ceived Harrison's message than, with barely a score of 
dismounted troopers, he charged the Indian line. So 
foolhardy a performance could only be expected to end 
in disaster. Daviess fell, mortally wounded, and his 
men, such of them as were not dead, turned and fled for 
their lives. 

The Prophet, who had been chanting appeals to the 
Great Spirit from the top of a rock within view of his 
warriors but safely out of range of the American rifles 
(he evidently had some doubts as to the efficacy of his 
charms), realized that, as a result of the unforeseen 
obstinacy of the Americans' resistance, victory was fast 
slipping from his grasp and that his only hope of suc- 
cess lay in an overwhelming charge. Roused to re- 
newed fanaticism by his fervid exhortations, the Indi- 
ans once again swept forward, whooping like madmen. 

But the Americans were ready for them, and as the 
yelling redskins came within range they met them with a 
volley of buckshot which left them wavering, undecided 
whether to come on or to retreat. Harrison, whose 
plan was to maintain his lines unbroken until daylight 
and then make a general advance, and who had been 
constantly riding from point to point within the camp to 
keep the assailed positions reinforced, realized that the 



When We Smashed the Prophefs Power 39 

crucial moment had arrived. Now was his chance to 
drive home the deciding blow. Boyd, recognizing as 
quickly as Harrison the opportunity thus presented, 
ordered a bugler to sound the charge, and his infantry 
roared down upon the Indian line in a human avalanche 
tipped with steel. At the same moment he ordered up 
the two squadrons of dragoons which he had been hold- 
ing in reserve. "Column right into line!" he roared, 
in the voice which had resounded over so many fields 
in far-ofif Hindustan. "Trot! Gallop! Charge! Hip, 
hip, here we go!" The Indians, panic-stricken at the 
sight of the oncoming troopers in their brass helmets 
and streaming plumes of horsehair, broke and ran. 

Tippecanoe was won, though at a cost to the Ameri- 
cans of nearly two hundred killed and wounded, includ- 
ing two lieutenant-colonels, two majors, five captains, 
and several lieutenants. The discredited Prophet, now 
become an object of hatred and derision among his own 
people, fled for his life while the victorious Americans 
burned his town behind him. Tecumseh, returning 
from the south to be greeted by the news of the disaster 
to his plans resulting from his brother's folly, threw in 
his lot with the British, commanded England's Indian 
allies in the War of 181 2, and died two years later at the 
battle of the Thames, when his old adversary, Harrison, 
once again led the Americans to victory. For his share 
in the Tippecanoe triumph, Boyd received a brigadier- 
general's commission. Harrison was started on the 
road which was to end at the White House. The peril 
of the great Indian confederation was ended forever, 
and the civilization of the West was advanced a quarter 
of a century. 



THE PIRATE WHO TURNED PATRIOT 



It is not flattering for us to have to admit that we are 
greatly indebted to a pirate for the success of the Ameri- 
cans against the British attack on New Orleans in 1814. 
Such is the case, however. And we shall have to make 
concessions to our pride by recalling the old adage that 
there is some good in every one. This will be rather easy 
for us to do in the instance of Jean Lafitte. Lafitte was 
not the leering, heartless, walk-the-plank type of pirate 
that had infested the Spanish Main in the days of the 
treasure-laden ships. He was rather a gentleman pirate, 
preying upon the illicit slave-smugglers — one lawless ele- 
ment operating upon another. However, one deed makes 
Jean Lafitte of heroic mold. When Andrew Jackson 
was organizing his motley army to repel the British, 
Lafitte placed patriotism above all other considerations, 
and offered his own cannon and the services of his expert 
marksmen in defense of a state which had set a price 
on his head. 



THE PIRATE WHO TURNED PATRIOT 

How many well-informed people are aware, I wonder, 
that the fact that the American flag, and not the British, 
flies to-day over the Mississippi Valley is largely due to 
the eleventh-hour patriotism of a pirate ? Of the many 
kinds of men of many nationalities who have played 
parts of greater or less importance in the making of our 
national history, none is more completely cloaked in 
mystery, romance, and adventure than Jean Lafitte. 
The last of that long line of buccaneers who for more 
than two centuries terrorized the waters and ravaged 
the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, his exploits make the 
wildest fiction appear commonplace and tame. Al- 
though he was as thoroughgoing a pirate as ever plun- 
dered an honest merchantman, I do not mean to imply 
that he was a leering, low-browed scoundrel, with a red 
bandanna twisted about his head and an armory of 
assorted weapons at his waist, for he was nothing of the 
sort. On the contrary, from all I can learn about him, 
he appears to have been a very gentlemanly sort of per- 
son indeed, tall and graceful and soft-voiced, and having 
the most charming manners. Though he regarded the 
law with unconcealed contempt, there came a crisis in 
our national history when he placed patriotism above 
all other considerations, and rendered an inestimable 
service to the country whose laws he had flouted and 
to the State which had set a price on his head. Indeed, 
we are indebted to Jean Lafitte in scarcely less measure 
than we are to Andrew Jackson for frustrating the Brit- 
ish invasion and conquest of Louisiana. 

43 



44 Some Forgotten Heroes 

Though the palmy days of piracy in the Gulf of 
Mexico really ended with the seventeenth century, by 
which time the rich cities of Middle America had been 
impoverished by repeated sackings and the gold-freighted 
caravels had taken to travelling under convoy, even at 
the beginning of the nineteenth century these storied 
waters still offered many opportunities to lawless and 
enterprising sea-folk. But the pirates of the nineteenth 
century, unlike their forerunners of the seventeenth, 
preyed on slave-ships rather than on treasure-galleons. 
Consider the facts. On January i, 1808, Congress 
passed an act prohibiting the further importation of 
slaves Into the United States. By this act the recently 
acquired territory of Louisiana, over which prosperity 
was advancing in three-league boots, was deprived of 
its supply of labor. With crops rotting In the fields for 
lack of laborers, the price of slaves rose until a negro 
fresh from the coast of Africa would readily bring a 
thousand dollars at auction In New Orleans. At the 
same time, remember, ship-loads of slaves were being 
brought to Cuba, where no such restrictions existed, 
and sold for three hundred dollars a head. Under such 
conditions smuggling was inevitable. 

At first the smugglers bought their slaves in the Cuban 
market, and running them across the Gulf of Mexico, 
landed them at obscure harbors on the Louisiana coast, 
whence they were marched overland to New Orleans 
and Baton Rouge. The smugglers soon saw, however, 
that the slavers carried small crews, poorly armed, and 
quickly made up their minds that it was a shameful 
waste of money to buy slaves when they could get them 
for nothing by the menace of their guns. In short, the 
smugglers became buccaneers, and as such drove a thriv- 



The Pirate Who Turned Patriot 45 

ing business in captured cargoes of "black ivory," as 
the slaves were euphemistically called. 

As the demand was greatest on the rich new lands 
along the Mississippi, it was at New Orleans that the 
buccaneers found the most profitable market for their 
human wares, for they could easily sail up the river to 
the city, dispose of their cargoes, and be off again with 
the quick despatch of regular liners to resume their 
depredations. But the buccaneers did not confine their 
attention to slave-ships, so that in a short time, despite 
the efforts of British, French, and American war-ships, 
the waters of the Gulf became as unsafe for all kinds of 
merchant vessels as they were in the days of Morgan 
and Kidd. 

As a base for their piratical and smuggling operations, 
as well as for supplies and repairs, the buccaneers chose 
Barataria Bay, a place which met their requirements 
as though made to order. The name is applied to all 
of the Gulf coast of Louisiana between the mouth of 
the Mississippi and the mouth of another considerable 
stream known as the Bayou La Fourche, the latter a 
waterway to a rich and populous region. The Bay of 
Barataria is screened from the Gulf, with which it is 
connected by a deep-water pass, by the island of Grande 
Terre, the trees on which were high enough to effectu- 
ally hide the masts of the buccaneers' vessels from the 
view of inquisitive war-ships cruising outside. Be- 
tween the Mississippi and La Fourche there is a per- 
fect network of small but navigable waterways which 
extend almost to New Orleans, so that the buccaneers 
thus had a back-stairs route, as it were, to the city, 
which brought their rendezvous at Grande Terre within 
safe and easy reach of the great mart of the Mississippi 
Valley. 



46 Some Forgotten Heroes 

Such supplies as the buccaneers did not get from the 
ships they captured, they obtained by purchase in New- 
Orleans. For the chains which were used in making up 
the caufles of slaves for transportation into the interior, 
they were accustomed to patronize the blacksmith-shop 
of the Brothers Lafitte, which stood — and still stands — 
on the northeast corner of Bourbon and St. Philippe 
Streets. Of the history of these brothers prior to their 
arrival in New Orleans nothing is definitely known. 
From their names, and because they spoke with the 
accent peculiar to the Garonne, they are credited with 
having been natives of the south of France, though 
whence they came and where they went are questions 
which have never been satisfactorily answered. They 
were quite evidently men of means, and might have 
been described as gentlemen blacksmiths, for they 
owned the slaves who pounded the iron. Being men of 
exceptional business shrewdness, it is not to be wondered 
at that from doing the buccaneers' blacksmithing they 
gradually became their agents and bankers, the smithy 
in St. Philippe Street coming in time to be a sort of 
clearing-house for many questionable transactions. 

Now Jean Lafitte was an extremely able man, com- 
bining a remarkable executive ability with a genius 
for organization. Through success in managing their 
affairs, he gradually increased his usefulness to the bucca- 
neers until he obtained complete control over them, 
and ruled them as despotically as a tribal chieftain. 
This was when his genius for organization had succeeded 
in uniting their different, and often rival, efforts and 
interests into a sort of pirates' corporation, composed 
of all the buccaneers, privateers, and freebooters doing 
business in the Gulf, this combination of outlaws, in- 



The Pirate Who Turned Patriot 47 

credible as it may seem, effectually controlling the price 
of slaves and many other things in the Mississippi 
Valley. 

The influence of this new element in the buccaneer 
business soon made itself felt. At that time New Or- 
leans was a sort of cross between an American frontier 
town and a West Indian port, its streets and barrooms 
being filled with swaggering adventurers, gamblers, and 
soldiers of fortune from every corner of the three Ameri- 
cas, the presence of most of whom was due to the ac- 
tivity of the sheriffs in their former homes. It was from 
these men, cool, reckless, resourceful, that Laiitte re- 
cruited his forces. 

Leaving his brother Pierre in charge of the New Or- 
leans branch of the enterprise, Jean Lafitte took up his 
residence on Grande Terre, where, under his directions, 
a fort was built, around which there soon sprang up a 
veritable city of thatched huts for the shelter of the 
buccaneers, and for the accommodation of the merchants 
who came to supply their wants or to purchase their 
captured cargoes. Within a year upward of a dozen 
armed vessels rendezvoused in Barataria Bay, and their 
crews addressed Jean Lafitte as "bosse.'' One of the 
Baratarians, a buccaneer of the walk-the-plank-and- 
scuttle-the-ship school named Grambo, who boldly 
called himself a pirate, and jeered at Lafitte's polite 
euphemism of privateer, was one day unwise enough to 
dispute the new authority. Without an instant's hesi- 
tation Lafitte drew a pistol and shot him through the 
heart in the presence of the whole band. After that 
episode there was no more insubordination. 

By 1 81 3 the Baratarians, who had long since extended 
their operations to include all kinds of merchandise. 



48 Some Forgotten Heroes 

were driving such a roaring trade that the commerce 
and shipping of New Orleans was seriously diminished 
(for why go to New Orleans for their supplies, the sea- 
captains and the plantation-owners argued, when they 
could get what they wanted at Barataria for a fraction 
of the price), the business of the banks decreased alarm- 
ingly under the continual lessening of their deposits, 
while even the national government began to feel its 
loss of revenue. The waters of Barataria, on the con- 
trary, were alive with the sails of incoming and out- 
going vessels; the wharfs which had been constructed 
at Grande Terre resounded to the creak of winches and 
the shouts of stevedores unloading contraband cargoes, 
and the long, low warehouses were filled with mer- 
chandise and the log stockades with slaves waiting to 
be sold and transported to the up-country plantations. 
So defiant of the law did Lafitte become that the streets 
of New Orleans were placarded with handbills announc- 
ing the auction sales at Barataria of captured cargoes, 
and to them flocked bargain-hunters from all that part 
of the South. An idea of the business done by the 
buccaneers at this time may be gained from an official 
statement that four hundred slaves were sold by auction 
in the Grande Terre market in a single day. 

Of course the authorities took action in the matter, 
but their efforts to enforce the law proved both danger- 
ous and ineffective. In October, 1811, a customs 
inspector succeeded in surprising a band of Baratarians 
and seizing some merchandise they had with them, but 
before he could convey the prisoners and the captured 
contraband to New Orleans Lafitte and a party of his 
men overtook him, rescued the prisoners, recovered the 
property, and in the fight which ensued wounded several 



The Pirate Who Turned Patriot 49 

of the posse. Some months later Lafitte killed an in- 
spector named Stout, who attempted to interfere with 
him, and wounded two of his deputies. 

Then Governor Claiborne issued a proclamation offer- 
ing a reward for the capture of Lafitte dead or alive, at 
the same time appealing to the legislature for permission 
to raise an armed force to break up the buccaneering 
business for good and all. The cautious legislators de- 
clined to take any action, however, because they were 
unwilling to interfere with an enterprise that, however 
illegal it might be, was unquestionably developing the 
resources of lower Louisiana, and incidentally adding 
immensely to the fortunes of their constituents. As 
for the Baratarians, they paid as scant attention to the 
governor's proclamation as though it had never been 
written. Surrounded by groups of admiring friends, 
Lafitte and his lieutenants continued to swagger through 
the streets of New Orleans; his men openly boasted of 
their exploits in every barroom of the city, and in places 
of public resort announcements of auctions at Barataria 
continued to be displayed. 

Now, it should be understood that the feebleness 
which characterized all the attempts of the federal 
government to break the power of the buccaneers was 
not due to any reluctance to prosecute them, but to the 
fact that it already had its attention taken up with far 
more pressing matters, for we were then in the midst of 
our second war with Great Britain. The long series of 
injuries which England had inflicted on the United 
States, such as the plundering and confiscation of our 
ships, the impressment into the British navy of our sea- 
men, and the interruption of our commerce with other 
nations, had culminated on June 18, 1812, by Congress 



so Some Forgotten Heroes 

declaring war. So unexpected was this action that it 
found the country totally unprepared. Our military 
establishment was barely large enough to provide gar- 
risons for the most exposed points on our far-flung bor- 
ders; the numerous ports on our seaboard were left 
unprotected and unfortified; and our navy consisted of 
but a handful of war-ships. The history of the first 
two years of the struggle, which was marked by brilliant 
American victories at sea, but by a disastrous attempt 
to invade Canada, has, however, no place in this 
narrative. 

Early in the summer of 1814, the British Govern- 
ment, exasperated by its failure to inflict any vital 
damage in the Northern States, determined to bring 
the war to a quick conclusion by the invasion and 
conquest of Louisiana. The preparations made for this 
expedition were in themselves startling. Indeed, few 
Americans have even a faint conception of the strength 
of the blow which England prepared to deal us, for with 
Napoleon's abdication and exile to Elba, and the ending 
of the war with France, she was enabled to bring her 
whole military and naval power against us. The British 
armada consisted of fifty war-ships, mounting more 
than a thousand guns. It was commanded by Vice- 
Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, under whom was Sir 
Thomas Hardy, the friend of Nelson, Rear- Admiral 
Malcolm, and Rear-Admiral Codrington, and was 
manned by the same sailors who had fought so valorously 
at the Nile and at Trafalgar. 

This great fleet acted as convoy for an almost equal 
number of transports, having on board eight thousand 
soldiers, which were the very flower of the British 
army, nearly all of them being veterans of the Napole- 



The Pirate Who Turned Patriot 51 

onic wars. Such importance did the British Govern- 
ment attach to the success of this expedition that it 
seriously considered giving the command of it to no 
less a personage than the Duke of Wellington. So cer- 
tain were the British that the venture would be suc- 
cessful that they brought with them a complete set of 
civil officials to conduct the government of this new" 
country which was about to be annexed to his Majesty's 
dominions, judges, customs inspectors, revenue-collec- 
tors, court-criers, printers, and clerks, together with 
printing-presses and office paraphernalia, being embarked 
on board the transports. A large number of ladies, 
wives and relatives of the officers, also accompanied 
the expedition, to take part in the festivities which were 
planned to celebrate the capture of New Orleans. And, 
as though to cap this exhibition of audacity, a number 
of ships were chartered by British speculators to bring 
home the booty, the value of which was estimated be- 
forehand at fourteen millions of dollars. Whether the 
British Government expected to be able to permanently 
hold Louisiana is extremely doubtful, for it must have 
been fully aware that the Western States were capable 
of pouring down a hundred thousand men, if necessary, 
to repel an invasion. It is probable, therefore, that 
they counted only on a temporary occupation, which 
they expected to prolong sufficiently, however, to give 
them time to pillage and lay waste the country, a course 
which they felt confident would quickly bring the gov- 
ernment at Washington to terms. 

This formidable armada set sail from England early 
in the summer of 18 14 and, reaching the Gulf of Mexico, 
established its base of operations, regardless of all the 
laws of neutrality, at the Spanish port of Pensacola. 



52 Some Forgotten Heroes 

One morning in the following September a British brig 
hove to off Grande Terre, and called attention to her 
presence by firing a cannon. Lafitte, darting through 
the pass in his four-oared barge to reconnoitre, met the 
ship's gig with three scarlet-coated officers in the stern, 
who introduced themselves as bearers of important 
despatches for Mr. Lafitte. The pirate chief, introduc- 
ing himself in turn, invited his unexpected guests ashore, 
and led the way to his quarters with that extraordinary 
charm of manner for which he was noted even among 
the punctilious Creoles of New Orleans. 

After a dinner of Southern delicacies, which elicited 
exclamations even from the blase British officers, Lafitte 
opened the despatches. They were addressed to Jean 
Lafitte, Esquire, commandant at Barataria, from the 
commander-in-chief of the British forces at Pensacola, 
and bluntly offered him thirty thousand dollars, payable 
in Pensacola or New Orleans, a commission as captain 
in the British navy, and the enlistment of his men in 
the naval or military forces of Great Britain if he would 
assist the British in their impending invasion of Loui- 
siana. Though it was a generous offer, no one knew 
better than the British commander that Lafitte's co- 
operation was well worth the price, for, familiar with the 
network of streams and navigable swamps lying between 
Barataria Bay and New Orleans, he was capable of 
guiding a British expedition through these secret water- 
ways to the very gates of the city before the Americans 
would have a hint of its approach. It is not too much 
to assert that at this juncture the future of New Orleans, 
and indeed of the whole Mississippi Valley, hung upon 
the decision of Jean Lafitte, a pirate and fugitive from 
justice with a price upon his head. 



The Pirate Who Turned Patriot 53 

Whether Lafitte seriously considered accepting the 
offer there is, of course, no way of knowing. That it 
must have sorely tempted him it seems but reasonable 
to suppose, for he was not an American, either by birth 
or naturalization, and the prospect of exchanging his 
hazardous outlaw's life, with a vision of the gallows ever 
looming before him, for a captain's commission in the 
royal navy, with all that that implied, could hardly have 
failed to appeal to him strongly. That he promptly 
decided to reject the offer speaks volumes for the man's 
strength of character and for his faith in American 
institutions. Appreciating that at such a crisis every 
hour gained was of value to the Americans, he asked 
time to consider the proposal, requesting the British 
officers to await him while he consulted an old friend and 
associate whose vessel, he said, was then lying in the bay. 

Scarcely was he out of sight, however, before a band 
of buccaneers, acting, of course, under his orders, seized 
the officers and hustled them into the interior of the 
island, where they were politely but forcibly detained. 
Here they were found some days later by Lafitte, who 
pretended to be highly indignant at such unwarrantable 
treatment of his guests. Releasing them with profuse 
apologies, he saw them safely aboard their brig, and 
assured them that he would shortly communicate his 
decision to the British commander. But that officer's 
letter was already in the hands of a friend of Lafitte's 
in New Orleans, who was a member of the legislature, 
and accompanying it was a communication from the 
pirate chief himself, couched in those altruistic and 
patriotic phrases for which the rascal was famous. In 
it he asserted that, though he admitted being guilty 
of having evaded the payment of certain customs duties, 



54 Some Forgotten Heroes 

he had never lost his loyalty and affection for the United 
States, and that, notwithstanding the fact that there was 
a price on his head, he would never miss an opportunity 
of serving his adopted country. A few days later Lafitte 
forwarded through the same channels much valuable 
information which his agents had gathered as to the 
strength, resources, and plans of the British expedition, 
enclosing with it a letter addressed to Governor Clai- 
borne in which he offered the services of himself and his 
men in defense of the State and city on condition that 
they were granted a pardon for past offenses. 

Receiving no reply to this communication Lafitte 
sailed up the river to New Orleans in his lugger and 
made his way to the residence of the governor. Gov- 
ernor Claiborne was seated at his desk, immersed in the 
business of his office, when the door was softly opened, 
and Lafitte, stepping inside, closed it behind him. Clad 
in the full-skirted, bottle-green coat, the skin-tight 
breeches of white leather, and the polished Hessian boots 
which he affected, he presented a most graceful and 
gallant figure. As he entered he drew two pistols from 
his pockets, cocked them, and covered the startled gov- 
ernor, after which ominous preliminaries he bowed with 
the grace for which he was noted. 

"Sir," he remarked pleasantly, "you may possibly 
have heard of me. My name is Jean Lafitte." 

"What the devil do you mean, sir," exploded the 
governor, "by showing yourself here? Don't you know 
that I shall call the sentry and have you arrested?" 

"Pardon me, your Excellency," interrupted Lafitte, 
moving his weapons significantly, "but you will do 
nothing of the sort. If you move your hand any nearer 
that bell I shall be compelled to shoot you through the 



The Pirate Who Turned Patriot 55 

shoulder, a necessity, believe me, which I should deeply 
regret. I have called on you because I have something 
important to say to you, and I intend that you shall 
hear it. To begin with, you have seen fit to put a price 
upon my head?" 

"Upon the head of a pirate, yes," thundered the gov- 
ernor, now almost apoplectic with rage. 

"In spite of that fact," continued Lafitte, "I have 
rejected a most flattering offer from the British Govern- 
ment, and have come here, at some small peril to my- 
self, to renew in person the offer of my services in re- 
pelling the coming invasion. I have at my command a 
body of brave, well-armed, and highly disciplined men 
who have been trained to fight. Does the State care to 
accept their services or does it not?" 

The governor, folding his arms, looked long at Lafitte 
before he answered. Then he held out his hand. "It 
is a generous offer that you make, sir. I accept it with 
pleasure." 

"At daybreak to-morrow, then," said Lafitte, replac- 
ing his pistols, "my men will be awaiting your Excellen- 
cy's orders across the river." Then, with another sweep- 
ing bow, he left the room as silently as he had entered it. 

Governor Claiborne immediately communicated La- 
fitte's offer to General Andrew Jackson, then at Mobile, 
who had been designated by the War Department to 
conduct the defense of Louisiana. Jackson, who had 
already issued a proclamation denouncing the British 
for their overtures to "robbers, pirates, and bandits," 
as he termed the Baratarians, promptly replied that the 
only thing he would have to do with Lafitte was to hang 
him. Nevertheless, when the general arrived in New 
Orleans a few days later, Lafitte called at his head- 



$6 Some Forgotten Heroes 

quarters and requested an interview. By this time 
Jackson was conscious of the feebleness of the resources 
at his disposal for the defense of the city and of the 
strength of the armament directed against it, which 
accounts, perhaps, for his consenting to receive the 
"bandit." Lafitte, looking the grim soldier squarely 
in the eye, repeated his offer, and so impressed was 
Jackson with the pirate's cool and fearless bearing that 
he accepted his services. 

On the loth of December, 1814, ten days after Jack- 
son's arrival in New Orleans, the British armada reached 
the mouth of the Mississippi. Small wonder that the 
news almost created a panic in the city, for the very 
names of the ships and regiments composing the expedi- 
tion had become famous through their exploits in the 
Napoleonic wars. It was a nondescript and motley 
force which Jackson had hastily gathered to repel this 
imposing army of invasion. Every man capable of 
bearing arms in New Orleans and its vicinity — planters, 
merchants, bankers, lawyers — had volunteered for ser- 
vice. To the local company of colored freedmen was 
added another one composed of negro refugees from 
Santo Domingo, men who had sided with the whites 
in the revolution there and had had to leave the island 
in consequence. Even the prisoners in the calaboose 
had been released and provided with arms. 

From the parishes round about came Creole volun- 
teers by the hundred, clad in all manner of clothing and 
bearing all kinds of weapons. From Mississippi came 
a troop of cavalry under Hinds, which was followed a 
few hours later by Coffee's famous brigade of "Dirty 
Shirts," composed of frontiersmen from the forests of 
Kentucky and Tennessee, who after a journey of eight 



The Pirate Who Turned Patriot 57 

hundred miles through the wilderness answered Jack- 
son's message to hurry by covering the one hundred 
and fifty miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans 
in two days. Added to these were a thousand raw 
militiamen, who had been brought down on barges and 
flat-boats from the towns along the upper river, four 
companies of regulars, Beale's brigade of riflemen, a 
hundred Choctaw Indians in war-paint and feathers, 
and last, but in many respects the most efficient of all, 
the corps of buccaneers from Barataria, under the com- 
mand of the Lafittes. The men, dragging with them 
cannon taken from their vessels, were divided into two 
companies, one under Captain Beluche (who rose in 
after years to be admiral-in-chief of Venezuela) and the 
other under a veteran privateersman named Dominique 
You. These men were fighters by profession, hardy, 
seasoned, and cool-headed, and as they swung through 
the streets of New Orleans to take up the position which 
Jackson had assigned them, even that taciturn old 
soldier gave a grunt of approbation. 

Jackson had chosen as his line of defence an artificial 
waterway known as the Rodriguez Canal, which lay 
some five miles to the east of the city, and along its 
embankments, which in themselves formed pretty good 
fortifications, he distributed his men. On the night of 
December 23 a force of two thousand British succeeded, 
by means of boats, in making their way, through the 
chain of bayous which surrounds the city, to within a 
mile or two of Jackson's lines, where they camped for 
the night. Being informed of their approach (for the 
British, remember, had the whole countryside against 
them), Jackson, knowing the demoralizing effect of a 
night attack, directed Coffee and his Tennesseans to 



58 Some Forgotten Heroes 

throw themselves upon the British right, while at the 
same moment Beale's Kentuckians attacked on the left. 
Trained in all the wiles of Indian warfare, the frontiers- 
men succeeded in reaching the outskirts of the British 
camp before they were challenged by the sentries. Their 
reply was a volley at close quarters and a charge with 
the tomahawk — for they had no bayonets — which drove 
the British force back in something closely akin to a 
rout. 

Meanwhile Jackson had set his other troops at work 
strengthening their line of fortifications, so that when the 
sun rose on the morning of the day before Christmas 
it found them strongly intrenched behind earthworks 
helped out with timber, sand bags, fence-rails, and cotton 
bales — whence arose the myth that the Americans 
fought behind bales of cotton. The British troops were 
far from being in Christmas spirits, for the truth had 
already begun to dawn upon them that men can fight 
as well in buckskin shirts as in scarlet tunics, and that 
these raw-boned wilderness hunters, with their powder- 
horns and abnormally long rifles, were likely to prove 
more formidable enemies than the imposing grenadiers 
of Napoleon's Old Guard, whom they had been fighting 
in Spain and France. On that same day before Christ- 
mas, strangely enough, a treaty of peace was being signed 
by the envoys of the two nations in a little Belgian town, 
four thousand miles away. 

On Christmas Day, however, the wonted confidence 
of the British soldiery was somewhat restored by the 
arrival of Sir Edward Pakenham, the new commander- 
in-chief, for even in that hard-fighting day there were 
few European soldiers who bore more brilliant reputa- 
tions. A brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington, he 



The Pirate Who Turned Patriot 59 

had fought side by side with him through the Peninsu- 
lar War; he had headed the storming party at Badajoz; 
and at Salamanca had led the charge which won the day 
for England and a knighthood for himself. An earldom 
and the governorship of Louisiana, it was said, had been 
promised him as his reward for the American expedition. 
Pakenham's practised eye quickly appreciated the 
strength of the American position, which, after a council 
of war, it was decided to carry by storm. During the 
night of the 26th the storming columns, eight thousand 
strong, took up their positions within half a mile of the 
American lines. As the sun rose next morning over 
fields sparkling with frost, the bugles sounded the ad- 
vance, and the British army, ablaze with color, and in 
as perfect alignment as though on parade, moved for- 
ward to the attack. As they came within range of 
the American guns, a group of plantation buildings 
which masked Jackson's front were blown up, and the 
British were startled to find themselves confronted by 
a row of ship's cannon, manned as guns are seldom 
manned on land. Around each gun was clustered a 
crew of lean, fierce-faced, red-shirted ruffians, caked with 
sweat and mud : they were Lafitte's buccaneers, who had 
responded to Jackson's orders by running in all the way 
from their station on the Bayou St. John that morning. 
Not until he could make out the brass buttons on the 
tunics of the advancing British did Lafitte give the 
command to fire. Then the artillery of the pirate- 
patriots flashed and thundered. Before that deadly fire 
the scarlet columns crumbled as plaster crumbles be- 
neath a hammer, the men dropping, first by twos and 
threes, then by dozens and scores. In five minutes 
the attacking columns, composed of regiments which 



6o Some Forgotten Heroes 

were the boast of the British army, had been compelled 
to sullenly retreat. 

The British commander, appreciating that the repulse 
of his forces was largely due to the fire of the Baratarian 
artillery, gave orders that guns be brought from the 
fleet and mounted in a position where they could silence 
the fire of the buccaneers. Three days were consumed 
in the herculean task of moving the heavy pieces of ord- 
nance into position, but when the sun rose on New 
Year's morning it showed a skilfully constructed line 
of intrenchments, running' parallel to the American 
front and armed with thirty heavy guns. While the 
British were thus occupied, the Americans had not been 
idle, for Jackson had likewise busied himself in con- 
structing additional batteries, while Commodore Pat- 
terson, the American naval commander, had gone 
through the sailors' boarding-houses of New Orleans 
with a fine-tooth comb, impressing every nautical- 
looking character on which he could lay his hands, re- 
gardless of nationality, color, or excuses, to serve the 
guns. 

With their storming columns sheltered behind the 
breastworks, awaiting the moment when they would 
burst through the breach which they confidently expected 
would shortly be made in the American defences, the 
British batteries opened fire with a crash which seemed 
to split the heavens. Throughout the artillery duel 
which ensued splendid service was rendered by the men 
under Lafitte, who trained their guns as carefully and 
served them as coolly as though they were back again 
on the decks of their privateers. The storming parties, 
which were waiting for a breach to be made, waited in 
vain, for within an hour and thirty minutes after the 



The Pirate Who Turned Patriot 6i 

action opened the British batteries were silenced, their 
guns dismounted, and their parapets levelled with the 
plain. The veterans of Wellington and Nelson had been 
outfought from first to last by a band of buccaneers, 
reinforced by a few score American bluejackets and a 
handful of nondescript seamen. 

Pakenham had one more plan for the capture of the 
city. This was a general assault by his entire army on 
the American lines. His plan of attack was simple, and 
would very probably have proved successful against 
troops less accustomed to frontier warfare than the 
Americans. Colonel Thornton, with fourteen hundred 
men, was directed to cross the river during the night of 
January 7, and, creeping up to the American lines under 
cover of the darkness, to carry them by assault. His 
attack was to be the signal for a column under General 
Gibbs to storm Jackson's right, and for another, under 
General Keane, to throw itself against the American 
left, General Lambert, who had just arrived with two 
fresh regiments, being held in reserve. So carefully had 
the British commanders perfected their plans that the 
battle was already won — in theory. 

No one knew better than Jackson that th's was to be 
the deciding round of the contest, and he accordingly 
made his preparations to win it. He also had received 
a reinforcement, for the long-expected militia from Ken- 
tucky, two thousand two hundred strong, had just 
arrived, after a forced march of fifteen hundred miles, 
though in a half-naked and starving condition. Our 
history contains nothing finer, to my way of thinking, 
than the story of how these mountaineers of the Blue 
Ridge, footsore, ragged, and hungry, came pouring 
down from the north to repel the threatened invasion. 



62 Some Forgotten Heroes 

The Americans, who numbered, all told, barely four 
thousand men, were scattered along a front of nearly 
three miles, one end of the line extending so far into a 
swamp that the soldiers stood in water to their waists 
during the day, and at night slept on floating logs made 
fast to trees. 

Long before daybreak on the morning of the 8th of 
January the divisions of Gibbs and Keane were in posi- 
tion, and waiting impatiently for the outburst of mus- 
ketry which would be the signal that Thornton had begun 
his attack. Thornton had troubles of his own, however, 
for the swift current of the Mississippi, as though wishing 
to do its share in the nation's defence, had carried his 
boats a mile and a half down-stream, so that it was day- 
light before he was able to effect a landing, when a sur- 
prise was, of course, out of the question. But Pakenham, 
naturally obstinate and now made wholly reckless by the 
miscarriage of his plans, refused to recall his orders; 
so, as the gray mists of the early morning slowly lifted, 
his columns were seen advancing across the fields. 

"Steady now, boys! Steady!" called Jackson, as he 
rode up and down behind his lines. "Don't waste your 
ammunition, for we've none to spare. Pick your man, 
wait until he gets within range, and then let him have 
it! Let's get this business over with to-day!" His 
orders were obeyed to the letter, for not a shot was fired 
until the scarlet columns were within certain range. 
Then the order "Commence firing" was repeated down 
the line. Neither hurriedly, nor excitedly, nor con- 
fusedly was it obeyed, but with the utmost calmness 
and deliberation, the frontiersmen, trained to use the 
rifle from boyhood, choosing their targets, and calculat- 
ing their ranges as unconcernedly as though they were 



The Pirate Who Turned Patriot 63 

hunting in their native forests. Still the British columns 
pressed indomitably on, and still the lean and lantern- 
jawed Jackson rode up and down his lines, cheering, 
cautioning, exhorting, directing. Suddenly he reined 
up his horse at the Baratarian battery commanded by 
Dominique You. 

"What's this? What's this?" he exclaimed. "You 
have stopped firing? What the devil does this mean, 
sir?" 

"Of course we've stopped firing, general," said the 
buccaneer, touching his forelock man-o'-war fashion. 
"The powder's good for nothing. It might do to shoot 
blackbirds with, but not redcoats." 

Jackson beckoned to one of his aides-de-camp. 

"Tell the ordnance ofhcer that I will have him shot 
in five minutes as a traitor if Dominique complains 
again of his powder," and he galloped off. When he 
passed that way a few minutes later the rattle of the 
musketry was being punctuated at half-minute intervals 
with the crash of the Baratarian guns. 

"Ha, friend Dominique," called Jackson, "I'm glad 
to see you're at work again." 

"Pretty good work, too, general," responded the buc- 
caneer. "It looks to me as if the British have discovered 
that there has been a change of powder in this battery." 

He was right. Before the combined rifle and artillery 
fire of the Americans the British columns were melting 
like snow under a spring rain. Still their officers led 
them on, cheering, pleading, threatening, imploring. 
Pakenham's arm was pierced by a bullet; at the same 
instant another killed his horse, but, mounting the pony 
of his aide-de-camp, he continued to encourage his dis- 
heartened and wavering men. Keane was borne bleed- 



64 Some Forgotten Heroes 

ing from the field, and a moment later Gibbs, mortally 
wounded, was carried after him. 

The panic which was just beginning to seize the British 
soldiery was completed at this critical instant by a shot 
from one of the Baratarians' big guns which burst 
squarely in the middle of the advancing column, caus- 
ing terrible destruction in the solid ranks. Pakenham's 
horse fell dead, and the general reeled into the arms of 
an officer who sprang forward to catch him. Terribly 
wounded, he was carried to the shelter of a spreading 
oak, beneath which, five minutes later, he breathed his 
last. Then the ebb-tide began. The shattered regi- 
ments, demoralized by the death of their commander, 
and fearfully depleted by the American fire, broke 
and ran. Ten minutes later, save for the crawling, 
agonized wounded, not a living foe was to be seen. 
But the field, which had been green with grass half an 
hour before, was carpeted with scarlet now, and the 
carpet was made of British dead. Of the six thousand 
men who took part in the attack. It is estimated that 
two thousand six hundred were killed or wounded. Of 
the Ninety-third Regiment, which had gone into action 
nine hundred strong, only one hundred and thirty- 
nine men answered to the roll-call. The Americans had 
eight men killed and thirteen wounded. The battle 
had lasted exactly twenty-five minutes. At eight o'clock 
the American bugles sounded "Cease firing," and Jack- 
son — whom this victory was to make President of the 
United States — followed by his staff, rode slowly down 
the lines, stopping at each command to make a short 
address. As he passed, the regimental fifes and drums 
burst into "Hail, Columbia," and the rows of weary, 
powder-grimed men, putting their caps on the ends of 



The Pirate Who Turned Patriot 65 

their long rifles, swung them in the air and cheered madly 
the victor of New Orleans. 

There is Httle more to tell. On March 17 the British 
expedition, accompanied by the judges and customs- 
inspectors and revenue-collectors, and by the officers' 
wives who had come out to take part in the festivities 
which were to mark the conquest, set sail from the mouth 
of the Mississippi, reaching Europe just in time to par- 
ticipate in the Waterloo campaign. In the general 
orders issued by Jackson after the battle the highest 
praise was given to the Lafittes and their followers from 
Barataria, while the official despatches to Washington 
strongly urged that some recognition be made of the 
extraordinary services rendered by the erstwhile pirates. 

A few weeks later the President granted a full pardon 
to the inhabitants of Barataria, his message concluding: 
"Offenders who have refused to become the associates of 
the enemy in war upon the most seducing terms of invi- 
tation, and who have aided to repel his hostile invasion 
of the territory of the United States, can no longer be 
considered as objects of punishment, but as objects of 
generous forgiveness." Taking advantage of this am- 
nesty, the ex-pirates settled down to the peaceable lives 
of fishermen and market-gardeners, and their descen- 
dants dwell upon the shores of Barataria Bay to this day. 
As to the future movements of the brothers Lafitte, 
beyond the fact that they established themselves for a 
time at Galveston, whence they harassed Spanish com- 
merce in the Gulf of Mexico, nothing definite is known. 
Leaving New Orleans soon after the battle, they sailed 
out of the Mississippi, and out of this story. 



THE LAST FIGHT OF THE "GENERAL 
ARMSTRONG" 



At the outbreak of the War of 1812 the American navy 
was pitifully small and in no condition to meet even a 
part of the great British fleet on the high seas. Our only 
means, therefore, of counteracting the blockade of our 
ports that appeared inevitable was for President Madi- 
son to commission individuals to fit out privateers to 
prey on British commerce. Over two hundred of them 
put to sea at the very beginning of the war. Manned by 
men who would dare anything for victory and a share in 
the huge profits from the captures, they were a constant 
menace to British commerce. The work of the privateers, 
together with the outstanding successes of Perry and 
MacDonough on the Lakes, and various single encoun- 
ters on the Atlantic, went a long way toward establishing 
among the British a wholesome respect for our sea-fighters. 
This story gives the thrilling details of how one lone priva- 
teer defied a detachment of three British war-ships and 
so crippled it that the British squadron was delayed for 
ten days in joining the expedition against New Orleans. 
This delay enabled Jackson to prepare for an adequate 
defense, which led to the defeat of the British forces. 



THE LAST FIGHT OF THE "GENERAL 
ARMSTRONG" 

We leaned over the rail of the Hamburg, Colonel 
Roosevelt and I, and watched the olive hills of Fayal 
rise from the turquoise sea. Houses white as chalk be- 
gan to peep from among the orange groves; what looked 
at first sight to be a yellow ribbon tossed carelessly 
upon the ground turned into a winding road; then we 
rounded a headland, and the U-shaped harbor, edged by 
a sleepy town and commanded by a crumbling fortress, 
lay before us, 

"In there," said the ex-President, pointing eagerly 
as our anchor rumbled down, "was waged one of the 
most desperate sea-fights ever fought, and one of the 
least known; in there lies the wreck of the General 
Armstrong, the privateer that stood off twenty times 
her strength in British men and guns, and thereby 
saved Louisiana from invasion. It is a story that should 
make the thrills of patriotism run up and down the back 
of every right-thinking American." 

Everything about her, from the carved and gilded 
figurehead, past the rakish, slanting masts to the slender 
stern, indicated the privateer. As she stood into the 
roadstead of Fayal late In the afternoon of September 
26, 1814, black-hulled and white-sparred, carrying an 
amazing spread of snowy canvas, she made a picture 
that brought a grunt of approval even from the surly 
Azorian pilot. Hardly had the red-white-and-blue en- 

69 



70 Some Forgotten Heroes 

sign showing her nationaUty fluttered to her peak before 
a harbor skiff bearing the American consul, Dabney, 
shot out from shore; for these were troublous times on 
the Atlantic, and letters from the States were few and 
far between. Rounding her stem, he read, with a 
thrill of pride, "General Armstrong, New York.'' 

The very name stood for romance, valor, hairbreadth 
escape. For of all the two-hundred-odd privateers that 
put out from American ports at the outbreak of the War 
of 1 8 12 to prey on British commerce, none had won so 
high a place in the popular imagination as this trim- 
built, black-hulled schooner. Built for speed, and carry- 
ing a spread of canvas at which most skippers would 
have stood aghast, she was the fastest and best-handled 
privateer afloat, and had always been able to show her 
heels to the enemy on the rare occasions when the su- 
perior range of her seven guns had failed to pound him 
into submission, her list of captures having made rich 
men of her owners. 

The story of her desperate encounter oflf the mouth of 
the Surinam River with the British sloop of war Coquette, 
with four times her weight in guns, had fired the popular 
imagination as had few other events of the war. Al- 
though her commander, Samuel Chester Reid, was not 
long past his thirtieth birthday, no more skilful navi- 
gator or daring fighter ever trod a quarter-deck, and his 
crew of ninety men — Down-East fishermen, old man-o'- 
war's men, Creole privateersmen who had fought under 
Lafitte, reckless adventurers of every sort and kind — 
would have warmed the heart of bluff old John Paul 
Jones himself. 

Just as dusk was falling the officer on watch reported 
a sail in the ofifing, and Reid and the consul, hurrying 



The Last Fight of the ^'General Armstrong'' 71 

on deck, made out the British brig Carnation, of eighteen 
guns, with two other war- vessels in her wake : the thirty- 
eight-gun frigate Rota, and the Plantagenet, of seventy- 
four. Now, as the privateer lay in the innermost harbor, 
where a dead calm prevailed, while the three British 
ships were fast approaching before the brisk breeze 
which was blowing outside, Reid, who knew the line 
which marks foolhardiness from courage, appreciating 
that the chances of his being able to hoist anchor, make 
sail, and get out of the harbor before the British squadron 
arrived to block the entrance were almost infinitesimal, 
decided to stay where he was and trust to the neutrality 
of the port, a decision that was confirmed by the assur- 
ances of Consul Dabney that the British would not dare 
to attack a vessel lying in a friendly harbor. But therein 
the consul was mistaken. 

The Carnation, learning the Identity of the American 
vessel from the pilot, hauled close into the harbor, not 
letting go her anchor until she was within pistol-shot of 
the General Armstrong. Instantly a string of signal- 
flags fluttered from her mast, and the message was 
promptly acknowledged by her approaching consorts, 
which thereupon proceeded to stand off and on across 
the mouth of the harbor, thus barring any chance of 
the privateer making her escape. So great was the com- 
motion which ensued on the Carnation's deck that Reid, 
becoming suspicious of the Englishman's good faith, 
warped his ship under the very guns of the Portuguese 
fort. 

About eight o'clock, just as dark had fallen, Captain 
Reid saw four boats slip silently from the shadow of the 
Carnation and pull toward him with muffled oars. If 
anything more were needed to convince him of their 



72 Some Forgotten Heroes 

hostile intentions, the moon at that moment appeared 
from behind a cloud and was reflected by the scores of 
cutlasses and musket-barrels in all four of the approach- 
ing boats. As they came within hailing distance Reid 
swung himself into the shrouds. 

"Boats there!" he shouted, making a trumpet of his 
hands. "Come no nearer! For your own safety I 
warn you!" 

At his hail the boats halted, as though in indecision, 
and their commanders held a whispered consultation. 
Then, apparently deciding to take the risk, and hoping, 
no doubt, to catch the privateer unprepared, they gave 
the order: "Give way all !" The oars caught the water 
together, and the four boats, loaded to the gunwales with 
sailors and marines, came racing on. 

" Let 'em have it, boys ! " roared Reid, and at the word 
a stream of flame leaped from the dark side of the pri- 
vateer and a torrent of grape swept the crowded boats, 
almost annihilating one of the crews and sending the 
others, crippled and bleeding, back to the shelter of 
their ship. 

By this time the moon had fully risen, and showed the 
heights overlooking the harbor to be black with specta- 
tors, among whom were the Portuguese governor and his 
staff; but the castle, either from weakness or fear, showed 
no signs of resenting the outrageous breach of neutrality 
to which the port had been subjected. Angered and 
chagrined at their repulse, the British now threw all 
caution aside. The long-boats and gigs of all three 
ships were lowered, and into them were crowded nearly 
four hundred men, armed with muskets, pistols, and 
cutlasses. Reid, seeing that an attack was to be made 
in force, proceeded to warp his vessel still closer inshore, 



The Last Fight of the '^General Armstrong^ ^ 73 

mooring her stem and stern within a few rods of the 
castle. Moving two of the nine-pounders across the 
deck, and cutting ports for them in the bulwarks, he 
brought five guns, in addition to his famous "long tom," 
to bear on the enemy. With cannon double-shotted, 
boarding-nets triced up, and decks cleared for action, 
the crew of the General Armstrong lay down beside their 
guns to await the British attack. 

It was not long in coming. Just as the bells of the 
old Portuguese cathedral boomed twelve a dozen boats, 
loaded to the water's edge with sailors and marines, 
whose burnished weapons were like so many mirrors 
under the rays of the moon, swung around a promontory 
behind which they had been forming and, with measured 
stroke of oars, came sweeping down upon the lone priva- 
teer. The decks of the General Armstrong were black 
and silent, but round each gun clustered its crew of half- 
naked gunners, and behind the bulwarks knelt a line of 
cool, grim riflemen, eyes sighting down their barrels, 
cheeks pressed close against the stocks. Up and down 
behind his men paced Reid, the skipper, cool as a win- 
ter's morning. 

"Hold your fire until I give the word, boys," he 
cautioned quietly. "Wait till they get within range, 
and then teach 'em better manners." 

Nearer and nearer came the shadowy line of boats, 
the oars rising and falling with the faultless rhythm 
which marks the veteran man-o'-war's man. On they 
came, and now the waiting Americans could make out 
the gilt-lettered hatbands of the bluejackets and the 
white cross-belts and the brass buttons on the tunics 
of the marines. A moment more and those on the 
Armstrong s deck could see, beneath the shadow of the 



74 Some Forgotten Heroes 

leather shakoes, the tense, white faces of the British 
boarders. 

"Now, boys!" roared Captain Reid; "let 'em have it 
for the honor of the flag!" and from the side of the pri- 
vateer leaped a blast of flame and lead, cannon and 
musketry crashing in chorus. Never were men taken 
more completely by surprise than were those British 
sailors, for they had expected that Reid, relying on the 
neutrality of the port, would be quite unprepared to 
resist them. But, though the American fire had caused 
terrible havoc in the crowded boats, with the bulldog 
courage for which the British sailors were justly famous, 
they kept indomitably on. "Give way! Give way 
all!" screamed the boy-coxswains, and in the face of a 
withering rifle-fire the sailors, recovering from their 
momentary panic, bent grimly to their oars. Through 
a perfect hail-storm of lead, right up to the side of the 
privateer, they swept. Six boats made fast to her 
quarter and six more to her bow. "Boarders up and 
away !" bellowed the ofiicers, hacking desperately at the 
nettings with their swords, and firing their pistols point- 
blank into the faces they saw above them. The Arm- 
strong's gunners, unable to depress the muzzles of their 
guns enough so that they could be brought to bear, 
lifted the solid shot and dropped them from the rail 
into the British boats, mangling their crews and crash- 
ing through their bottoms. From the shelter of the 
bulwarks the American riflemen fired and loaded and 
fired again, while the negro cook and his assistant 
played their part in the defense by pouring kettles of 
boiling water over the British who were attempting to 
scramble up the sides, sending them back into their 
boats again scalded and groaning. 



The Last Fight of the '^General Armstrong'^ 75 

There lias been no fiercer struggle in all the annals of 
the sea. The Yankee gunners, some of them gray- 
haired men who had seen service with John Paul Jones 
in the Bon Homme Richard, changed from cannon-balls 
to grape, and from grape to bags of bullets, so that by 
the time the British boats drew alongside they were 
little more than floating shambles. The dark waters 
of the harbor were lighted up by spurts of flame from 
muskets and cannon; the high, shrill yell of the Yankee 
privateersmen rose above the deep-throated hurrahs of 
the English sailors; the air was filled with the shouts 
and oaths of the combatants. Urged on by their officers' 
cries of "No quarter! Give the Yankees no quarter!" 
the British division which had attacked the bow hacked 
its way through the nettings, and succeeded by sheer 
weight of numbers in getting a footing on the deck, all 
three of the American lieutenants being killed or disabled 
in the terrific hand-to-hand struggle that ensued. 

At this critical juncture, when the Americans on the 
forecastle, their oflficers fallen and their guns dismounted, 
were being pressed slowly back by overwhelming num- 
bers. Captain Reid, having repulsed the attack on the 
Armstrong's quarter, led the after division forward at a 
run, the privateersmen, though outnumbered five to 
one, driving the English overboard with the resistless 
fury of their onset. As the British boats attempted to 
withdraw into safety, they were raked again and again 
with showers of lead; two of them sank, two of them 
were captured by the Americans. Finally, with nearly 
three hundred of their men — three-quarters of the 
cutting-out force — dead or wounded, the British, now 
cowed and discouraged, pulled slowly and painfully out 
of range. Some of the most brilliant victories the 



76 Some Forgotten Heroes 

British navy has ever gained were far less dearly pur- 
chased. 

At three in the morning Reid received a note from 
Consul Dabney asking him to come ashore. He then 
learned that the governor had sent a letter to the British 
commander asking him to desist from further hostilities, 
as several buildings in the town had been injured by 
the British fire and a number of the inhabitants wounded. 
To this request Captain Lloyd had rudely replied that 
he would have the Yankee privateer if he had to knock 
the town into a heap of ruins. Returning on board, 
Reid ordered the dead and wounded taken ashore, and 
told the crew to save their personal belongings. 

At daybreak the Carnation, being of lighter draft 
than the other vessels, stood close in for a third attack, 
opening on the privateer with every gun she could bring 
to bear. But even in those days the fame of American 
gunners was as wide as the seas, and so well did the crew 
of the General Armstrong uphold their reputation that 
the Carnation was compelled to beat a demoralized re- 
treat, with her rigging cut away, her foremast about to 
fall, and with several gaping holes between wind and 
water. But Reid, appreciating that there was abso- 
lutely no chance of escape, and recognizing that further 
resistance would entail an unnecessary sacrifice of his 
men's lives, by which nothing could be gained, ordered 
the crew to throw the nine-pounders which had rendered 
such valiant service overboard and to leave the ship. 
The veteran gunners, who were as much attached to 
their great black guns as a cavalryman is to his horse, 
obeyed the order with tears ploughing furrows down their 
powder-begrimed cheeks. Then Reid with his own hand 
trained the long tom down his vessel's hatchway, and 



TJie Last Fight of the ^^ General Armstrong'' 'j'j 

pulling the lanyard sent a charge of grape crashing 
through her hull, from which she at once began to 
sink. Ten minutes later, before a British crew could 
reach her side, the General Armstrong went to the bottom 
with her flag still defiantly flying. 

Few battles have been fought in which the odds were 
so unequal, and in few battles have the relative losses 
been so astounding. The three British war-ships car- 
ried two thousand men and one hundred and thirty 
guns, and of the four hundred men who composed the 
boarding party they lost, according to their own ac- 
counts, nearly three hundred killed and wounded. Of 
the American crew of ninety men, two were killed and 
seven wounded. This little crew of privateersmen had, 
in other words, put out of action more than three times 
their own number of British, and had added one more 
laurel to our chaplet of triumphs on the sea. 

The Americans had scarcely gained the shore before 
Captain Lloyd — ^who had been so severely wounded in 
the leg that amputation was necessary — sent a per- 
emptory message to the governor demanding their 
surrender. But the men who could not be taken at 
sea were not the men to be captured on land. Re- 
treating to the mountainous Interior of the island, the 
Americans took possession of a thick-walled convent, 
over which they hoisted the Stars and Stripes, and from 
which they defied British and Portuguese alike to come 
and take them. No one tried. 

All of the following day was spent by the British in 
burying their one hundred and twenty dead — you can 
see the white gravestones to-day if you will take the 
trouble to climb the hill behind the little town — but It 
took them a week to repair the damage caused by the 



78 Some For gotten Heroes 

battle. And so deep was their chagrin and mortifica- 
tion that when two British ships put into Fayal a few 
days later, and were ordered to take home the wounded, 
they were forbidden to carry any news of the disaster 
back to England. 

To Captain Reid and his little band of fighters is due 
in no small measure the credit of saving New Orleans 
from capture and Louisiana from invasion. Lloyd's 
squadron was a part of the expedition then gathering at 
Pensacola for the invasion of the South, but it was so 
badly crippled in its encounter with the privateer that 
it did not reach the Gulf of Mexico until ten days later 
than the expedition had planned to sail. The expedi- 
tion waited for Lloyd and his reinforcements, so that 
when it finally approached New Orleans, Jackson and 
his frontiersmen, who had hastened down by forced 
marches from the North, had made preparations to give 
the English a warm reception. Had the expedition 
arrived ten days earlier it would have found the Ameri- 
cans unprepared, and New Orleans would have fallen. 

Captain Reid and his men, landing on their native 
soil at Savannah, found their journey northward turned 
into a triumphal progress. The whole country went 
wild with enthusiasm. There was not a town or village 
on the way but did them honor. The city of Richmond 
gave Captain Reid a great banquet, and the State of 
New York presented him with a sword of honor. But 
of all the tributes which were paid to the little band of 
heroes, none had the flavor of the concluding line of a 
letter written by one of the British officers engaged in 
the action to a relative in England. " If this is the way 
the Americans fight," he wrote, "we may well say, 
*God deliver us from our enemies.' " 



THE MAN WHO DARED TO CROSS THE 
RANGES 



As we ride westward across the mountain ranges to 
the Pacific with all the ease and luxury a twentieth cen- 
tury limited train affords, few of us can imagine that 
those very ranges, now tunnelled and spanned, once con- 
stituted barriers that the Spaniards in California never 
dreamed would be passed by trappers, prospectors, or 
settlers from the United States. This is the story of one 
of the first who dared to do that seemingly impossible thing 
— ^who risked the anger of the Spanish authorities in Cali- 
fornia, and on his return found the pass and blazed the 
trail across the Sierras, which later became the overland 
route to California. 



THE MAN WHO DARED TO CROSS THE 
RANGES 

About the word frontiersman there is a pretty air of 
romance. The very mention of it conjures up a vision 
of lean, sinewy, brown-faced men, in fur caps and mocca- 
sins and fringed buckskin, slipping through virgin for- 
ests or pushing across sun-scorched prairies — advance- 
guards of civilization. Hardy, resolute, taciturn figures, 
they have passed silently across the pages of our history 
and we shall see their like no more. To them we owe 
a debt that we can never repay — nor, indeed, have we 
even publicly acknowledged it. We followed by the 
trails which they had blazed for us; we built our towns 
in those rich valleys and pastured our herds on those 
fertile hillsides which theirs were the first white men's 
eyes to see. 

The American frontiersman was never a self-seeker. 
His discoveries he left as a heritage to those who followed 
him. In almost every case he died poor and, more 
often than not, with his boots on, David Livingstone 
and Henry M. Stanley, the two Englishmen who did 
more than any other men for the opening up of Africa, 
lie in Westminster Abbey, and thousands of their coun- 
trymen each year stand reverently beside their tombs. 
To Cecil Rhodes, another Anglo-African pioneer, a great 
national memorial has been erected on the slopes of 
Table Mountain. Far, far greater parts in the conquest 
of a wilderness, the winning of a continent, were played 
by Daniel Boone, James Bowie, Kit Carson, Davy 



82 Some Forgotten Heroes 

Crockett; yet how many of those who to-day enjoy the 
fruits of the perils they faced, the hardships they en- 
dured, know much more of them than as characters in 
dime novels, can tell where they are buried, can point 
to any statues of monuments which have been erected 
to their memories ? 

There are nearly three million people in the State of 
California, and most of them boast of it as "God's own 
country." They have more State pride than any people 
that I know, yet I would be willing to wager almost 
anything you please that you can pick a hundred native 
sons of California, and put to each of them the question, 
"Who was Jedediah Smith ?" and not one of them would 
be able to answer it correctly. The public parks of San 
Francisco and Los Angeles and San Diego and Sacra- 
mento have innumerable statues of one kind and another, 
but you will find none of this man with the stern old 
Puritan name; they are starting a hall of fame in Cali- 
fornia, but no one has proposed Jedediah Smith as de- 
serving a place in it. Yet to him, perhaps more than 
to any other man, is due the fact that California is Ameri- 
can; he was the greatest of the pathfinders; he was the 
real founder of the Overland Trail; he was the man who 
led the way across the ranges. Had it not been for the 
trail he blazed and the thousands who followed in his 
footsteps the Sierra Nevadas might still mark the line 
of our frontier. 

The westward advance of population which took place 
during the first quarter of the nineteenth century far 
exceeded the limits of any of the great migrations of 
mankind upon the older continents. The story of the 
American onset to the beckoning West is one of the 
wonder-tales of histoiy. Over the natural waterway of 



The Man Who Dared to Cross the Ranges 83 

the great northern lakes, down the road to Pittsburg, 
along the trail which skirted the Potomac, and then down 
the Ohio, over the passes of the Cumberland into Ten- 
nessee, round the end of the Alleghanies into the Gulf 
States, up the Missouri, and so across the Rockies to 
the headwaters of the Columbia, or southwestward from 
St. Louis to the Spanish settlements of Santa Fe, the 
hardy pioneers poured in an ever-increasing stream, 
carrying with them little but axe, spade, and rifle, some 
scanty household effects, a small store of provisions, a 
liberal supply of ammunition, and unlimited faith, cour- 
age, and enterprise. 

During that brief period the people of the United 
States extended their occupation over the whole of that 
vast region lying between the Alleghanies and the Rock- 
ies — a territory larger than all of Europe, without 
Russia — annexed it from the wilderness, conquered, sub- 
dued, improved, cultivated, civilized it, and all without 
one jot of governmental assistance. Throughout these 
years, as the frontiersmen pressed into the West, they 
continued to fret and strain against the Spanish bound- 
aries. The Spanish authorities, and after them the 
Mexican, soon became seriously alarmed at this silent 
but resistless American advance, and from the City of 
Mexico orders went out to the provincial governors that 
Americans venturing within their jurisdiction should 
be treated, whenever an excuse offered, with the utmost 
severity. But, notwithstanding the menace of Mexican 
prisons, of Indian tortures, of savage animals, of thirst 
and starvation in the wilderness, the pioneers pushed 
westward and ever westward, until at last their further 
progress was abruptly halted by the great range of the 
Sierra Nevada, snow-crested, and presumably impassa- 



84 Some Forgotten Heroes 

ble, which rose like a titanic wall before them, barring 
their farther march. 

It was at about the time of this halt in our westward 
progress that Captain Jedediah Smith came riding onto 
the scene. You must picture him as a gaunt-faced, 
lean-flanked, wiry man, with nerves of iron, sinews of 
rawhide, a skin like oak- tanned leather, and quick on his 
feet as a catamount. He was bearded to the ears, of 
course, for razors formed no part of the scanty equip- 
ment of the frontiersman, and above the beard shone a 
pair of very keen, bright eyes, with the concentrated 
wrinkles about their corners that come of much staring 
across sun-swept spaces. He was sparing of his words, 
as are most men who dwell in the great solitudes, and, 
like them, he was, in an unorthodox way, devout, his 
stern and rugged features as well as his uncompromising 
scriptural name betraying the grim old Puritan stock 
from which he sprang. His hair was long and black, 
and would have covered his shoulders had it not been 
tied at the back of the neck by a leather thong. His 
dress was that of the Indian adapted to meet the require- 
ments of the adventuring white man: a hunting-shirt 
and trousers of fringed buckskin, embroidered moccasins 
of elkhide, and a cap made from the glossy skin of a 
beaver, with the tail hanging down behind. 

On hot desert marches, and in camp, he took off the 
beaver-skin cap and twisted about his head a bright 
bandanna, which, when taken with his gaunt, unshaven 
face, made him look uncommonly like a pirate. These 
garments were by no means fresh and gaudy, like those 
affected by the near-frontiersmen you see on motion- 
picture screens; instead they were very soiled and 
much worn and greasy, and gave evidence of having 



The Man Who Dared to Cross the Ranges 85 

done twenty-four hours' duty a day for many months 
at a stretch. Hanging on his chest was a capacious 
powder-horn, and in his belt was a long, straight knife, 
very broad and heavy in the blade — a first cousin of 
that deadly weapon to which James Bowie was in after 
years to give his name; in addition he carried a rifle, 
with an altogether extraordinary length of barrel, which 
brought death to any living thing within a thousand 
yards on which its foresight rested. His mount was a 
plains-bred pony, as wiry and unkempt and enduring as 
himself. Everything considered. Smith could have been 
no gentle-looking figure, and I rather imagine that, if 
he were alive and ventured into a Western town to-day, 
he would probably be arrested by the local constable as 
an undesirable character. I have now sketched for you, 
in brief, bold outline, as good a likeness of Smith as I 
am able with the somewhat scanty materials at hand, for 
he lived and did his pioneering in the days when fron- 
tiersmen were as common as traffic policemen are now, 
added to which the men who were familiar with his 
exploits were of a sort more ready with their pistols than 
with their pens. 

The dates of Smith's birth and death are not vital to 
this story, and perhaps it is just as well that they are 
not, for I can find no record of when he came into the 
world, and only the Indian warrior who wore his scalp- 
lock at his waist could have told the exact date on which 
he went out of it. It is enough to know that, as the 
nineteenth century was passing the quarter mark, Smith 
was the head of a firm of fur-traders. Smith, Jackson & 
Soublette, which had obtained from President John 
Quincy Adams permission to hunt and trade to their 
hearts' content in the region lying beyond the Rocky 



86 Some Forgotten Heroes 

Mountains. It would have been much more to the 
point to have obtained the permission of the Mexican 
governor-general of the Californias, or of the great chief 
of the Comanches, for they held practically all of the 
territory in question between them. 

Those were the days whose like we shall never know 
again, when the streams were alive with beaver, when 
there were more elk and antelope on the prairies than 
there are cattle now, and when the noise made by the 
moving buffalo herds sounded like the roll of distant 
thunder. They were the days when a fortune, as for- 
tunes were then reckoned, awaited the man with a sure 
eye, a body inured to hardships, and unlimited ammuni- 
tion. What the founder of the As tor fortune was doing 
in the Puget Sound country. Smith and his companions 
purposed to do beyond the Rockies; and, with this end 
in view, established their base camp on the eastern shores 
of the Great Salt Lake, not far from where Ogden now 
stands. This little band of pioneers formed the western- 
most outpost of American civilization, for between them 
and the nearest settlement, at the junction of the Missis- 
sippi and Ohio Rivers, stretched thirteen hundred miles 
of savage wilderness. Livingstone, on his greatest 
journey, did not penetrate half as far into unknown 
Africa as Smith did into unknown America, and while 
the English explorer was at the head of a large and well- 
equipped expedition, the American was accompanied by 
a mere handful of men. 

In August, 1826, Smith and a small party of his 
hunters found themselves in the terrible Painted Desert, 
that God-forsaken expanse of sand and lava where the 
present States of Arizona, Utah, and Nevada meet. 
Water there was none, for the streams had run dry, and 



The Man Who Dared to Cross the Ranges 87 

the horses and pack-mules were dying of thirst and ex- 
haustion; the game had entirely disappeared; the sup- 
plies were all but finished — and five hundred miles of 
the most inhospitable country in the world lay between 
them and their camp on Great Salt Lake. The situation 
was perilous, indeed, and a decision had to be made 
quickly if any of them were to get out alive. 

"What few supplies we have left will be used up be- 
fore we get a quarter way back to the camp," said Smith. 
"Our only chance — and I might as well tell you it's a 
mighty slim one, boys — is in pushing on to California." 

"But California's a good four hundred miles away," 
expostulated his companions, "and the Sierras lie be- 
tween, and no one has ever crossed them." 

"Then I'll be the first man to do it," said Smith. 
"Besides, I've always had a hankering to learn what 
lies on the other side of those ranges. Now's my chance 
to find out." 

"I reckon there ain't much chance of our ever seeing 
Salt Lake or California either," grumbled one of the 
hunters, "and even if we do reach the coast the Mexi- 
cans'U clap us Into prison." 

"Well, so fur's I'm concerned," said Smith decisively, 
"I'd rather be alive and in a Greaser prison than to be 
dead in the desert. I'm going to California or die on 
the way." 

History chronicles few such marches. Westward 
pressed the litde troop of pioneers, across the sun-baked 
lava-beds of southwestern Utah, over the arid deserts and 
the barren ranges of southern Nevada, and so to the 
foot-hills of that great Sierran range which rears itself 
ten thousand feet skyward, forming a barrier which had 
theretofore separated the fertile lands of the Pacific 



88 Some Forgotten Heroes 

slope from the rest of the continent more effectually than 
an ocean. The lava-beds gave way to sand wastes 
dotted with clumps of sage-brush and cactus, and the 
cactus changed to stunted pines, and the pines ran out 
in rocks, and the rocks became covered with snow, and 
still Smith and his hunters struggled on, emaciated, 
tattered, almost barefooted, lamed by the cactus spines 
on the desert, and the stones on the mountain slopes, 
until at last they stood upon the very summit of the 
range and, like that other band of pioneers in an earlier 
age, looked down on the promised land after their wan- 
derings in the wilderness. No explorer in the history of 
the world, not Columbus, nor Pizarro, nor Champlain, 
nor De Soto, ever gazed upon a land so fertile and so 
full of beauty. The mysterious, the jealously guarded, 
the storied land of California lay spread before them like 
a map in bas-relief. Then the descent of the western 
slope began, the transition from snow-clad mountain 
peaks to hillsides clothed with subtropical vegetation 
amazing the Americans by its suddenness. Imagine 
how like a dream come true it must have been to these 
men, whose lives had been spent in the less kindly climate 
and amid the comparatively scanty vegetation of the 
Middle West, to suddenly find themselves in this fairy- 
land of fruit and (lowers ! 

"It is, indeed, a white man's country," said Smith 
prophetically, as, leaning on his long rifle, he gazed upon 
the wonderful panorama which unrolled itself before 
him. "Though it is Mexican just now, sooner or later 
it must and shall be ours." 

Heartened by the sight of this wonderful new country, 
and by the knowledge that they must be approaching 
some of the Mexican settlements, but with bodies sadly 




Ajler a painting by Frederick Remington. Copyrighted, P. H. Collier &• Son. 

Westward pressed the little troop of pioneers, across the sun- 
baked lava beds of southwest Utah. 



The Man Who Dared to Cross the Ranges 89 

weakened from exposure, hunger, and exhaustion, the 
Americans slowly made their way down the slope, 
crossed those fertile lowlands which are now covered 
with groves of orange and lemon, and so, guided by some 
friendly Indians whom they met, came at last to the 
mission station of San Gabriel, one of that remarkable 
chain of outposts of the church founded by the inde- 
fatigable Franciscan, Father Junipero Serra. The little 
company of worn and weary men sighted the red-tiled 
roof of the mission just at sunset. 

I doubt if there was a more astonished community 
between the oceans than was the monastic one of San 
Gabriel when this band of ragged strangers suddenly 
appeared from nowhere and asked for food and shelter. 

"You come from the South — from Mexico?" queried 
the father superior, staring, half-awed, at these gaunt, 
fierce-faced, bearded men who spoke in a strange tongue. 

"No, padre," answered Smith, calling to his aid the 
broken Spanish he had picked up in his trading expedi- 
tions to Santa Fe, "we come from the East, from the 
country beyond the great mountains, from the United 
States. We are Americans," he added a little proudly. 

"They say they come from the East," the brown- 
robed monks whispered to each other. "It is impossi- 
ble. No one has ever come from that direction. Have 
not the Indians told us many times that there is no food, 
no water in that direction, and that, moreover, there is 
no way to cross the mountains ? It is, indeed, a strange 
and incredible tale that these men tell. But we will 
offer them our hospitality in the name of the blessed 
St. Francis, for that we withhold from no man; but it is 
the part of wisdom to despatch a messenger to San 
Diego to acquaint the governor of their coming, for it 



90 Some Forgotten Heroes 

may well be that they mean no good to the people of 
this land." 

Had the good monks been able to look forward a few 
score years, perhaps they would not have been so ready 
to offer Smith and his companions the shelter of the 
mission roof. But how were they to know that these 
ragged strangers, begging for food at their mission door, 
were the skirmishers for a mighty host which would one 
day pour over those mountain ranges to the eastward as 
the water pours over the falls at Niagara; that within 
rifle-shot of where their mission stood a city of a million 
souls would spread itself across the hills; that down the 
dusty Camino Real, which the founder of their mission 
had trudged so often in his sandals and woollen robe, 
would whirl strange horseless, panting vehicles, putting 
a mile a minute behind their flying wheels; that twin 
lines of steel would bring their southernmost station at 
San Diego within twenty hours, instead of twenty days, 
of their northernmost outpost at Sonoma; and that over 
this new land would fly, not the red-white-and-green 
standard of Mexico, but an alien banner of stripes and 
stars ? 

The four years which intervened between the collapse 
of Spanish rule in Mexico and the arrival of Jedediah 
Smith at San Gabriel were marked by political chaos in 
the Californias. When a governor of Alta California 
rose in the morning he did not know whether he was the 
representative of an emperor, a king, a president, or a 
dictator. As a result of these perennial disorders, the 
Mexican officials ascribed sinister motives to the most 
innocent episodes. No sooner, therefore, did Governor 
Echeandia learn of the arrival in his province of a 
mysterious party of Americans than he ordered them 



The Man Who Dared to Cross the Ranges 91 

brought under escort to San Diego for examination. 
Though those present probably did not appreciate it, 
the meeting of Smith and Echeandia in the palace at 
San Diego was a peculiarly significant one. 

There sat at his ease in his great chair of state the 
saturnine Mexican governor, arrogant and haughty, 
beruffled and gold-laced, his high-crowned sombrero 
and his velvet jacket heavy with bullion, while in front 
of him stood the American frontiersman, gaunt, un- 
shaven, and ragged, but as cool and self-possessed as 
though he was at the head of a conquering army instead 
of a forlorn hope. The one was as truly the representa- 
tive of a passing as the other was of a coming race. 
Small wonder that Echeandia, as he observed the hardy 
figures and determined faces of the Americans, thought 
to himself how small would be Mexico's chance of hold- 
ing California if others of their countrymen began to 
follow in their footsteps. 

He and his officials cross-examined Smith as closely 
as though the frontiersman was a prisoner on trial for 
his life, as, in a sense, he was, for almost any fate might 
befall him and his companions in that remote corner of 
the continent without any one being called to account 
for it. Smith described the series of misfortunes which 
had led him to cross the ranges; he asserted that he de- 
sired nothing so much as to get back into American terri- 
tory again, and he earnestly begged the governor to 
provide him with the necessary provisions and permit 
him to depart. His story was so frank and plausible 
that Echeandia, with characteristic Spanish suspicion, 
promptly disbelieved every word of it, for why, he ar- 
gued, should any sane man make so hazardous a journey 
unless he were a spy and well paid to risk his life ? 



92 Some Forgotten Heroes 

For even in those early days, remember, the Mexicans 
had begun to fear the ambitions of the young republic 
to the eastward. So, despite their protests, he ordered 
the Americans to be imprisoned — and no one knew better 
than they did that, once within the walls of a Mexican 
prison, there was small chance of their seeing the out- 
side world again. Fortunately for the explorers, how- 
ever, it so happened that there were three American 
trading-schooners lying in San Diego harbor at the time, 
and their captains, determined to see the rights of their 
fellow countrymen respected, joined in a vigorous and 
energetic protest to the governor against this high- 
handed and unjustified action. This seems to have 
frightened Echeandia, for he reluctantly gave orders 
for the release of Smith and his companions, but or- 
dered them to leave the country at once, and by the same 
route by which they had come. 

When the year 1827 was but a few days old, therefore, 
the Americans turned their faces northward, but instead 
of retracing their steps in accordance with Echeandia's 
orders, they crossed the coast range, probably through 
the Tejon Pass, and kept on through the fertile region 
now known as the San Joaquin Valley, in the hope that 
by crossing the Sierra farther to the northward they 
would escape the terrible rigors of the Colorado desert. 
When some three hundred miles north of San Gabriel 
they attempted to recross the ranges, but a feat that 
had been hazardous in midsummer was impossible in 
midwinter, and the entire expedition nearly perished in 
the attempt. Several of the men and all the horses died 
of cold and hunger, and it was only by incredible exer- 
tions that Smith and his few remaining companions, 
terribly frozen and totally exhausted, managed to reach 
the Santa Clara Valley and Mission San Jos6. 



The Man Who Dared to Cross the Ranges 93 

So slow was their progress that the news of their 
approach preceded them and caused considerable dis- 
quietude to the monks. Learning from the Indians 
that he and his followers were objects of suspicion, 
Smith sent a letter to the father superior, in which he 
gave an account of his arrival at San Gabriel, of his inter- 
view with the governor, of his disaster in the Sierras, 
and of his present pitiable condition. "I am a long 
way from home," this pathetic missive concludes, "and 
am anxious to get there as soon as the nature of the case 
will permit. Our situation is quite unpleasant, being 
destitute of clothing and most of the necessaries of life, 
wild meat being our principal subsistence. I am, rev- 
erend father, your strange but real friend and Christian 
brother, Jedediah Smith." As a result of this appeal, 
the hospitality of the mission was somewhat grudg- 
ingly extended to the Americans, who were by this 
time in the most desperate condition. 

Hardships that would kill ordinary men were but un- 
pleasant incidents in the lives of the pioneers, however, 
and in a few weeks they were as fit as ever to resume 
their journey. But, upon thinking the matter over, 
Smith decided that he would never be content if he went 
back without having found out what lay still farther to 
the northward, for in him was the insatiable curiosity 
and the indomitable spirit of the born explorer. But 
as his force, as well as his resources, had become sadly 
depleted, he felt it imperative that he should first re- 
turn to Salt Lake and bring on the men, horses, and 
provisions he had left there. Accordingly, leaving most 
of his party in camp at San Jose, he set out with only two 
companions, recrossed the Sierra at one of its highest 
points (the place he crossed is where the railway comes 



94 Some Forgotten Heroes 

through to-day) and after several uncomfortably narrow 
escapes from landslides and from Indians, eventually 
reached the camp on Great Salt Lake, where he found 
that his people had long since given him and his com- 
panions up for dead. 

Breaking camp on a July morning, in 1827, Smith, 
with eighteen men and two women, turned his face once 
more toward California. To avoid the snows of the 
high Sierras, he chose the route he had taken on his first 
journey, reaching the desert country to the north of 
the Colorado River in early August. It was not until 
the party had penetrated too far into the desert to re- 
treat that they found that the whole country was burnt 
up. For several days they pushed on in the hope of 
finding water. Across the yellow sand wastes they would 
sight the sparkle of a crystal lake, and would hasten 
toward it as fast as their jaded animals could carry them, 
only to find that it was a mirage. 

Then the horrors preliminary to death by thirst be- 
gan: the animals, their blackened tongues protruding 
from their mouths, staggered and fell, and rose no more; 
the women grew delirious and babbled incoherent 
nothings; even the hardiest of the men stumbled as 
they marched, or tried to frighten away by shouts and 
gestures the fantastic shapes which danced before them. 
At last there came a morning when they could go no 
farther. Such of them as still retained their faculties 
felt that it was the end — that is, all but Jedediah Smith. 
He was of the breed which does not know the meaning 
of defeat, because they are never defeated until they 
are dead. Loading himself with the empty water- 
bottles, he set out alone into the desert, determined to 
follow one of the numerous buffalo trails, for he knew 



The Man Who Dared to Cross the Ranges 95 

that sooner or later it must lead him to water of some 
sort, even if to nothing more than a buffalo-wallow. 

Racked with the fever of thirst, his legs shaking from 
exhaustion, he plodded on, under the pitiless sun, mile 
after mile, hour after hour, until, struggling to the sum- 
mit of a low divide, he saw the channel of a stream in the 
valley beneath him. The expedition was saved. Stum- 
bling and sliding down the slope in his haste to quench 
his intolerable thirst, he came to a sudden halt on the 
river-bank. It was nothing but an empty watercourse 
into which he was staring — the river had run dry ! 
The shock of such a disappointment would have driven 
most men mad. Only for a moment, however, was the 
veteran frontiersman staggered; he knew the character 
of many streams in the West — that often their waters 
run underground a few feet below the surface, and in a 
moment he was on his knees digging frantically in the 
soft sand. Soon the sand began to grow moist, and 
then the coveted water slowly began to filter upward 
into the little excavation he had hollowed. 

Throwing himself flat on the ground, he buried his 
burning face in the muddy water — and as he did so a 
shower of arrows whistled about him. A war-party of 
Comanches, unobserved, had followed and surrounded 
him. He had but exchanged the danger of death by 
thirst for the even more dreadful fate of death by tor- 
ture. Though struck by several of the arrows, he held 
the Indians off until he had filled his water-bottles; 
then, retreating slowly, taking advantage of every par- 
ticle of cover, as only a veteran plainsman can, blazing 
away with his unerring rifle whenever an Indian was 
incautious enough to show himself. Smith succeeded in 
getting back to his companions with the precious water. 



96 Some Forgotten Heroes 

With their dead animals for breastworks, the pioneers 
succeeded in holding the Indians at bay for six-and- 
thirty hours, but on the second night the redskins, 
heavily reinforced, rushed them in the night, ten of 
the men and the two women being killed in the hand- 
to-hand fight which ensued, and the few horses which 
remained alive being stampeded. I rather imagine 
that the women were shot by their own husbands, for 
the women of the frontier always preferred death to 
capture by these fiends in paint and feathers. 

How Smith, calling to his assistance all his craft 
and experience as a plainsman, managed to lead his 
eight surviving companions through the encircling In- 
dians by night, and how, wounded, horseless, and pro- 
visionless as they were, he succeeded in guiding them 
across the ranges to San Bernardino, is but another 
example of this forgotten hero's courage and resource. 
Having lost everything that he possessed, for the whole 
of his scanty savings had been invested in the ill-fated 
expedition, Smith, with such of his men as were strong 
enough to accompany him, set out to rejoin the party 
he had left some months previously at Mission San Jose. 
Scarcely had he set foot within that settlement, however, 
before he was arrested and taken under escort to Mon- 
terey, where he was led before the governor, who, he 
found to his surprise and dismay, was no other than his 
old enemy of San Diego, Don Jose Echeandia. 

This time nothing would convince Echeandia that 
Smith was not the leader of an expedition which had 
territorial designs on California, and he promptly or- 
dered him to be taken to prison and kept in solitary con- 
finement as a dangerous conspirator. Thereupon Smith 
resorted to the same expedient he had used so success- 



The Man Who Dared to Cross the Ranges 97 

fully, and begged the captains of the American vessels 
in the harbor of Monterey for protection. So forcible 
were their representations that Echeandia finally agreed 
to release Smith on his swearing to leave California for 
good and all. 

To this proposal Smith willingly agreed and took the 
oath required of him, but, upon being released from 
prison, was astounded to learn that the governor had 
given orders that he must set out alone— that his 
hunters would not be permitted to accompany him. His 
and their protestations were disregarded. Smith must 
start at once and unaccompanied. He was given a horse 
and saddle, provisions, blankets, a rifle— and nothing 
more. It was a sentence of death which Echeandia had 
pronounced on this American frontiersman, and both 
he and Smith knew it. Without having committed any 
crime— unless it was a crime to be an American— Jede- 
diah Smith was driven out of the territory of a sup- 
posedly friendly nation, and told that he was at perfect 
liberty to make his way across two thousand miles of 
wilderness to the nearest American outpost— if he could. 
Striking back into that range of the Sierras which 
hes southeast of Fresno, Smith succeeded in crossing 
them for a fourth time, evidently intending to make 
his way back to his old stamping-ground on the Great 
Salt Lake. Our knowledge of what occurred after he 
had crossed the ranges for the last time is confined to 
tales told to the settlers in later years by the Indians. 
While emerging from the terrible Death Valley, where 
hundreds of emigrants were to lose their lives during 
the rush to the gold-fields a quarter of a century later, 
he was attacked at a water-hole by a band of Indians.' 
For many years afterward the Comanches were wont 



98 Some Forgotten Heroes 

to tell with admiration how this lone paleface, coming 
from out of the setting sun, had knelt behind his dead 
horse and held them off with his deadly rifle all through 
one scorching summer's day. But when nightfall came 
they crept up silently under cover of the darkness and 
rushed him. His scalp was highly valued, for it had 
cost the lives of twelve Comanche braves. 

But Jedediah Smith did not die in vain. Tales of the 
rich and virgin country which he had found beyond the 
ranges flew as though with wings across the land; soon 
other pioneers made their way over the mountains by 
the trails which he had blazed; long wagon-trains crawled 
westward by the routes which he had taken; strange 
bands of horsemen pitched their tents in the valleys 
where he had camped. The mission bells grew silent; 
the monk in his woollen robe and the caballero in his 
gold-laced jacket passed away; settlements of hardy, 
energetic, nasal-voiced folk from beyond the Sierras 
sprang up everywhere. Then one day a new flag floated 
over the presidio in Monterey — a flag that was not to 
be pulled down. The American republic had reached 
the western ocean, and thus was fulfilled the dream 
of Jedediah Smith, the man who showed the way. 



UNDER THE FLAG OF THE LONE STAR 



It is doubtful If an army patrol along the border could 
have kept back the eager settlers bound for the Spanish 
territory that was later to become Texas. In the earlier 
part of the nineteenth century they went under oflScial 
encouragement from the Spanish. There was adventure 
for the adventurous; unlimited range for the cattleman; 
rolling prairies for the grain-grower; and rich river- valleys 
for the cotton-planter. Soon after Mexico became a re- 
public there was a change of policy from encouragement 
to oppression. The safety and the liberties of thousands 
of Americans were put in jeopardy when the privilege of 
seK-government was taken from them. How Santa Anna 
was ingloriously defeated in his scheme to deprive the 
Texans of their rights; how deeds of valor comparable to 
any in history were performed by such men as Crockett, 
Travis, and Bowie; how that extraordinary man of the 
hour, Sam Houston, took the desperate chance for vic- 
tory against a well-equipped force of twice his number and 
dictated to the captured Mexican president the terms of 
independence for Texas — these exploits constitute a por- 
tion of our history we cannot neglect if we are to under- 
stand the spirit of westward pioneer movements which 
at the time seemed so obviously in the path of our destiny. 



UNDER THE FLAG OF THE LONE STAR 

Had you stood on the banks of the Brazos in Decem- 
ber of the year in which the nineteenth century became 
old enough to vote and looked northeastward across the 
plains of central Texas, your attention would doubtless 
have been attracted by a rolling cloud of dust. From 
out its yellow haze would have crept in time a straggling 
line of canvas-covered wagons. Iron-hard, bearded men, 
their faces tanned to the color of a much-used saddle, 
strode beside the wheels, their long-lashed blacksnakes 
cracking spasmodically, like pistol-shots, between the 
horns of the plodding oxen. Weary-faced women in 
sunbonnets and calico, with broods of barelegged, frowzy- 
headed youngsters huddled about them, peered curiously 
from beneath the arching wagon-tops. A thin fringe of 
scouts astride of wiry ponies, long-barrelled rifles rest- 
ing on the pommels of their saddles, rode on either flank 
of the slowly moving column. Other groups of alert 
and keen-eyed horsemen led the way and brought up 
the rear. Though these dusty migrants numbered less 
than half a thousand in all, though their garments were 
uniform only in their stern practicality and their shabby 
picturesqueness, though their only weapons were hunt- 
ing-rifles and the only music to which they marched was 
the rattle of harness and the creak of axletrees, they 
formed, nevertheless, an army of invasion, bent on the 
conquest not of a people, however, but of a wilderness. 
Who that saw that dusty column trailing across the 
Texan plains would have dreamed that these gaunt and 



I02 Some Forgotten Heroes 

shabby men and women were destined to conquer and 
civilize and add to our national domain a territory 
larger than the German Empire, with Switzerland, 
Holland, and Belgium thrown in ? Yet that trek of the 
pioneers, "southwesterly by the lone star," was the cur- 
tain-raiser for that most thrilling of historic dramas, or 
rather, melodramas: the taking of Texas. 

To understand the significance of that chain of star- 
tling and picturesque events which began with the stand 
of the settlers on the Guadalupe and culminated in the 
victory on the San Jacinto, without at least a rudimen- 
tary knowledge of the conditions which led up to it, is 
as impossible as it would be to master trigonometry 
without a knowledge of arithmetic. But fear not that 
you will be bored by the recital; the story is punctuated 
much too frequently with the crack of rifle and pistol 
for you to yawn or become sleepy-eyed. 

The American colonization of Texas — then known as 
the province of New Estremadura — began while Spain 
still numbered Mexico among her colonial possessions. 
When Iturbide ended Spanish rule in Mexico, in 1821, 
and thereby made himself Emperor of the third largest 
nation in the world (China and Russia alone being of 
greater area), he promptly confirmed the land grants 
which had been made by the Spanish authorities to the 
American settlers in Texas, both he and his immediate 
successors being only too glad to further the development 
of the wild and almost unknown region above the Rio 
Grande by these hardy, thrifty, industrious folk from the 
north. Under this official encouragement an ever- 
growing, ever widening stream of American emigration 
went rolling Texasward. The forests echoed to the axe 
strokes of woodsmen from Kentucky; the desert was fur- 



Under the Flag of the Lone Star 103 

rowed by the ploughshares of Ohio fanners; villages 
sprang up along the rivers; the rolling prairies were 
dotted with patches of ripening grain. Texas quickly 
became the magnet which drew thousands of the needy, 
the desperate, and the adventurous. Men of broken 
fortunes, men of roving habits, adventurers, land specu- 
lators, disappointed politicians, unsuccessful lawyers, 
men who had left their country for their country's good, 
as well as multitudes of sturdy, thrifty, hard-working 
folk desirous of finding homes for their increasing families 
poured into the land of promise afoot and on horseback, 
by boat and wagon-train, until, by 1823, there were 
probably not far from twenty thousand of these Ameri- 
can outlanders established between the Sabine and the 
Pecos. 

Meanwhile the government of Mexico was beginning 
the quick-change act with which it has alternately 
amused and exasperated the world to this day. The 
short-lived empire of Iturbide lasted but a year, the 
Emperor meeting his end with his back to a stone 
wall and his face to a firing-party. Victoria pro- 
claimed Mexico a republic and himself its President. 
Pedraza succeeded him in 1828. Then Guerrero over- 
threw Pedraza, and Bustamente overthrew Guerrero, 
and Santa Anna overthrew Bustamente and made him- 
self dictator, ruling the war-racked country with an 
iron hand. Now, a dictator, if he is to hold his job, 
much less enjoy any peace of mind, must rule a people 
who, either through fear or ignorance, are willing to 
forget about their constitutional rights and obligingly 
refrain from asking questions. But the American set- 
tlers in Texas, as each of the Mexican usurpers discovered 
in his turn and to his very great annoyance, were not 



I04 Some Forgotten Heroes 

built according to these specifications. They were not 
ignorant, and they were not in the least afraid, and when 
the privileges they had enjoyed were revoked or cur- 
tailed they resented it vigorously. 

Alarmed by the rapid increase in the number of Ameri- 
can settlers, disturbed by their independence and self- 
reliance, and realizing that they were daily becoming a 
greater menace to the tyrannical and dishonest methods 
of government which prevailed, the Mexican dictators 
determined to crush them before it was too late. In 
pursuance of this policy they inaugurated a systematic 
campaign of persecution. Sixty-odd years later the 
Boers adopted the same attitude toward the British 
settlers in the Transvaal that the Mexicans did toward 
the American settlers in Texas, and the same thing hap- 
pened in both cases. 

For three years after Mexico achieved its independence 
Texas remained a separate State of the republic, with a 
government of its own. But in 1824, in pursuance of 
this anti-American policy, it was deprived of the privilege 
of self-government and added to the State of Coahuila. 
Shortly after this a law was passed forbidding the further 
settlement of Americans in Texas and prohibiting Ameri- 
cans from even trading in that region. And, to still 
further harass and humiliate the Texans, a number of 
penal colonies, composed of the most desperate crimi- 
nals in the Mexican prisons, were established in Texas. 
Heretofore the Texans, in recognition of their services 
in transforming Texas from a savage wilderness into a 
civilized and prosperous province, had enjoyed immu- 
nity from taxes, but now custom-houses were established 
and the settlers were charged prohibitive duties even on 
the necessities of life. When they protested against so 



Under the Flag of the Lone Star 105 

flagrant an injustice the Mexican Government answered 
them by blockading their ports. Heavy garrisons were 
now quartered in the principal towns, the civil authori- 
ties were defied, and the settlers were subjected to the 
tyranny of unrestrained military rule. 

Still the Texans did not offer armed resistance. Their 
tight-drawn patience snapped, however, when, in 1834, 
Santa Anna, determined to crush for good and all the 
sturdy independence which animated them, ordered his 
brother-in-law, General Cos, to enter Texas with a force 
of fifteen hundred men and disarm the Americans, leav- 
ing only one rifle to every five hundred inhabitants. 
That order was all that was needed to fan the smoulder- 
ing embers of Texan resentment into the fierce flame of 
armed revolt. Were they to be deprived of those trusty 
rifles which they had brought with them on their long 
pilgrimage from the north, which were their only re- 
source for game, their only defense against Indians, 
their only means of resistance to oppression ? Those 
were the questions that the settlers asked themselves, 
and they answered them at Gonzales, on the banks of 
the Guadalupe. 

At Gonzales was a small brass field-piece which had 
been given to the settlers as a protection from the In- 
dians. A detachment of Mexican cavalry, some eight- 
score strong, was ordered to go to the town, capture the 
cannon, and disarm the inhabitants. News of their 
coming preceded them, however, and when the troopers 
reached the banks of the river opposite the town they 
found that all the boats had been taken to the other 
side, while the cannon which they had come to capture 
was drawn up in full view with a placard hanging from 
it. The placard bore the ominous invitation: "Come 



io6 Some Forgotten Heroes 

and take it." The Mexican commander, spurring his 
horse to the edge of the river, insolently called upon the 
inhabitants to give up their arms. It was the same de- 
mand, made for the same purpose, which an ofificer in a 
scarlet coat had made of another group of Americans, 
threescore years before, on the village green at Lexing- 
ton. It was the same demand ! And the same answer 
was given: "Come and take our weapons — if you can!" 
Though the Mexican officer had a force which outnum- 
bered the settlers almost ten to one, he prudently decided 
to wait, for even in those days the fame of the Texan 
riflemen had spread across the land. 

Meanwhile horsemen had carried the news of the raid 
on Gonzales to the outlying ranches and soon the set- 
tlers came pouring in until by nightfall they very nearly 
equalled the soldiery in number. Knowing the moral 
effect of getting in the first blow, they slipped across the 
river in the dark and charged the Mexican camp with an 
impetuosity and fierceness which drove the troopers 
back in panic-stricken retreat. As the Texans were 
going into action a parson who accompanied them 
shouted: "Remember, men, that we're fighting for our 
liberty ! Our wives, our children, our homes, our 
country are at stake ! The strong arm of Jehovah will 
lead us on to victory and to glory ! Come on, men ! 
Come on !" 

The news of this victory, though insignificant in itself, 
was as kindling thrown on the fires of insurrection. 
The settlers in Texas rose as one. In October, 1835, 
in a pitched battle near the Mission of the Immaculate 
Conception, outside of San Antonio, ninety-four Texan 
farmers, fresh from the plough, whipped four times that 
number of Mexicans. In December, after a five days* 
siege, the Alamo, in San Antonio, was carried by storm, 



Under the Flag of the Lone Star 107 

General Cos and fourteen hundred Mexican regulars, 
with twenty-one pieces of artillery, surrendering to less 
than four hundred Texans. By Christmas of 1835 
Texas was left without an armed enemy within her 
borders. 

When word was brought to Santa Anna that the garri- 
son of the Alamo had surrendered, he behaved like a 
madman. With clinched fists and uplifted arms he 
swore by all the saints in the calendar and all the devils 
in hell that he would never unbuckle his sword-belt 
until Texas was again a wilderness and every gringo 
settler was a fugitive, a prisoner, or a corpse. As it 
was at San Antonio that the Mexicans had suffered their 
most humiliating defeat, so it was San Antonio that the 
dictator chose as the place where he would wash out that 
defeat in blood, and on the 226. of February, 1836, he 
appeared before the city at the head of six thousand 
troops — the flower of the Mexican army. After their 
capture of San Antonio the Texans, most of whom were 
farmers, had returned to their homes and their crops, 
Colonel W. Barrett Travis being left to hold the town 
with only one hundred and forty-five men. With him 
were Davy Crockett, the stories of whose exploits on 
the frontier were already familiar in every American 
household, Bonham, the celebrated scout and Indian 
fighter, and James Bowie, who, in a duel on a Natchez 
River bar, had made famous the terrible long-bladed 
knife which his brother Rezin had made from a black- 
smith's file. A few days later thirty-seven brave hearts 
from Goliad succeeded in breaking through the lines of 
the besiegers, bringing the total strength of the garrison 
up to one hundred and eighty-three. Surrounding them 
was an army of six thousand ! 

The story of the last stand in the Alamo has been told 



io8 Some Forgotten Heroes 

so often that I hesitate to repeat It here. Yet It Is a tale 
of which Americans can never tire any more than they 
can tire of the story of Jones and the Bonhomme Richard, 
or of Perry on Lake Erie. The Texans, too few in num- 
bers to defend the town, withdrew into the Alamo, an 
enormously thick-walled building, half fortress and half 
church, which derived its name from being built in a 
clump of alamos or cottonwood-trees. For eleven days 
the Mexicans pounded the building with artillery and 
raked it with rifle-fire; for eleven days the Texans held 
them back In that historic resistance whose details are 
so generally and so uncertainly known. Day after day 
the defenders strained their eyes across the prairie in 
search of the help that never came. Day after day the 
blood-red flag that signified "No quarter" floated above 
the Mexican lines, while from the walls of the Alamo 
flaunted defiantly the flag with a single star. 

At sunset on the 4th of March the Mexican bom- 
bardment abruptly ceased, but no one knew better than 
Travis that it was but the lull which preceded the break- 
ing of the storm. Drawing up his men in the great 
chapel, Travis drew a line across the earthen floor with 
his sword. 

"Men," he said, "It's all up with us. A few more 
hours and we shall probably all be dead. There's no 
use hoping for help, for no force that our friends could 
send us could cut its way through the Mexican lines. So 
there's nothing left for It but to stay here and go down 
fighting. When the greasers storm the walls kill them 
as they come and keep on killing them until none of us 
are left. But I leave It to every man to decide for him- 
self. Those who wish to go out and surrender may do 
so and I shall not reproach them. As for me, I shall 



Under the Flag of the Lone Star 109 

stay here and die for Texas. Those who wish to stay 
with me will step across this line." 

There was not so much as a flicker of hesitation. The 
defenders moved across the line as one. Even the 
wounded staggered over with the others, and those who 
were too badly wounded to walk dragged themselves 
across on hands and knees. Bowie, who was ill with 
fever, lay on his cot, too weak to move. "Boys," he 
called feebly, "boys, I don't believe I can get over 
alone . . . won't some of you help me?" So they 
carried him across the line, bed and all. It was a pic- 
ture to stir the imagination, to send the thrills of pa- 
triotism chasing up and down one's spine: the gloomy 
chapel with its adobe walls and raftered ceiling; the line 
of stern-faced, powder-grimed men in their tattered 
frontier dress, crimsoned bandages knotted about the 
heads of many of them; the fever-racked but indomitable 
Bowie stretched upon his cot; the young commander — 
for Travis was but twenty-seven — striding up and down, 
in his hand a naked sword, in his eyes the fire of pa- 
triotism. 

On the morning of the 6th of March, before the sun 
had risen, Santa Anna launched his grand assault. Their 
bugles sounding the ominous notes of the deguello, 
which signified that no quarter would be given, the 
Mexican infantry, provided with scaling-ladders, swept 
forward at the double. Behind them rode the cavalry, 
with orders to sabre any man who flinched. As the 
Mexican columns came within range the Texans met 
them with a blast of lead which shrivelled and scattered 
them as the breath of winter shrivels and scatters the 
autumn leaves. The men behind the walls of the Ala- 
mo were master marksmen who had taken their degree in 



no Some Forgotten Heroes 

shooting from the stern college of the frontier, and they 
proved their marvellous proficiency that day. Crockett 
and Bonham aimed and fired as fast as rifles could be 
loaded and passed up to them, and at every spurt of 
flame a little, brown-faced man would drop with a crim- 
son patch on the breast of his tunic or a round blue hole 
in his forehead. 

Any troops on earth would have recoiled in the face 
of that deadly fire, and Santa Anna's were no exception. 
But the cavalry rode into them and at the point of their 
sabres forced them again to the attack. Again the 
shattered regiments advanced and attempted to place 
their ladders against the walls, but once more the sheer 
ferocity of the Texan defense sent them reeling back, 
bleeding and gasping. But there was a limit even to 
the powers of resistance of the Texans. The powder in 
their horns ran low; their arms grew weak from slaying. 
So, when the wave of brown-skinned soldiery rolled 
forward once again over its carpet of corpses, it topped 
and overflowed the desperately defended walls. The 
Texans, whose ammunition was virtually exhausted, 
were beaten back by sheer weight of numbers, but they 
rallied in the patio and, under the sky of Texas, made 
their final stand. 

What happened afterward is, and always must be, a 
matter of speculation. No one knows the story of the 
end. Even the number of victims is a matter of dispute 
to-day. Some say there were a hundred and eighty- 
three defenders, some say a hundred and eighty-six. 
Some assert that one woman escaped; some say two; 
others say none. Some declare that a negro servant 
got away; others declare with equal positiveness that 
he did not. Some state that half a dozen Americans 



Uitder the Flag of the Lone Star iii 

stood at bay with their backs to the wall, Crockett 
among them. That the Mexican general, Castrillon, 
offered them their lives if they would surrender, and that, 
when they took him at his word, he ordered them shot 
down like dogs. All we do know with any certainty of 
what went on within those blood-bespattered walls is 
that every American died fighting. Travis, revolver 
in one hand and sword in the other, went down amid a 
ring of men that he had slain. Bowie, propped on his 
pillows, shot two soldiers who attempted to bayonet 
him as he lay all but helpless and plunged his terrible 
knife into the throat of another before they could finish 
him. Crockett, so the Mexicans related afterward, 
fought to the last with his broken rifle, and was killed 
against the wall, but to get at him the Mexicans had to 
scramble over a heap of their own dead. No one will 
ever know how many of the enemy each of these raging, 
fighting, cornered men sent down the long and gloomy 
road before he followed them. Not an American re- 
mained alive. Death and Santa Anna held the place. 
As the inscription on the monument which was raised in 
later years to the defenders reads: "Thermopylae had 
her messenger of defeat; the Alamo had none." But 
before they died, the ninescore men who laid down their 
lives for Texas sent sixteen hundred Mexicans to their 
last accounting. 

While Santa Anna was besieging the Alamo, General 
Urrea invaded eastern Texas for the purpose of capturing 
San Patricio, Refugio, and Goliad and thus stamping 
out the last embers of insurrection. It was not a cam- 
paign; it was a butchery. The little garrison of San 
Patricio was taken by surprise and every man put to 
death. At Refugio, however, a force of little more 



112 Some Forgotten Heroes 

than a hundred men under Colonel Ward repulsed the 
Mexicans, whose loss in killed and wounded was double 
the entire number of the defenders. A few days later, 
however, Ward and his men, while falling back, were 
surrounded and taken prisoners. When Urrea's column 
appeared before Goliad, Colonel Fannin, whose force 
was outnumbered six to one, ordered a retreat, feeling 
confident that the Mexicans, for whose fighting abilities 
the Texans had the utmost contempt, would not dare 
to follow them. But the Texans made the fatal mistake 
of underrating their adversaries, for, before they had 
fallen back a dozen miles, they found themselves hemmed 
in by two thousand Mexicans. 

Escape was out of the question, so Fannin formed his 
three hundred men in hollow square and prepared to 
put up one of those fight-till-the-last-man-falls resis- 
tances for which the Texans had become famous. Be- 
ing cut off from water, however, and with a third of his 
men wounded, he realized that his chances of success 
were represented by a cipher; so, when the Mexican 
commander, who had been heavily reinforced, offered to 
parole both officers and men and return them to the 
United States if they would surrender, Fannin accepted 
the offer and ordered his men to stack their arms. The 
terms of the surrender were written in both English 
and Spanish, and were signed by the ranking officers of 
both forces with every formality. 

The Texan prisoners were marched back under guard 
to Goliad, the town they had so recently evacuated, and 
were confined in the old fort, where they were joined a 
few days later by Colonel Ward's command, who, as 
you will remember, had also been captured. On the 
night of the 26th of March a despatch rider rode into 



Under the Flag of the Lone Star 113 

Urrea's camp bearing a message from Santa Anna. It 
contained an order for the murder of all the prisoners. 
The next day was Palm Sunday. At dawn the Texans 
were awakened and ordered to form ranks in the court- 
yard. They were then divided into four parties and 
marched off in different directions under heavy guard. 
They had not proceeded a mile across the prairies before 
they were halted and their captors deliberately poured 
volley after volley into them until not a Texan was left 
standing. Then the cavalry rode over the corpse- 
strewn ground, hacking with their sabres at the dead. 
Upward of four hundred Texans were slaughtered at 
Goliad. The defenders of the Alamo died fighting with 
weapons in their hands, but these men were unarmed and 
defenseless prisoners, butchered in cold blood in one of 
the most atrocious massacres of history. 

With the extermination of the Texan garrisons, Santa 
Anna complacently assured himself that his work in the 
north was finished and prepared to return to the capital, 
where he was badly needed. It is never safe, you see, 
for a dictator to leave the chair of state for long, else he 
is likely to return and find a rival sitting in it. Now, 
however, Santa Anna felt that the Texan uprising was, 
to make use of a slangy but expressive phrase, all over 
but the shouting. But the Texans, as stout old John 
Paul Jones would have put it, had only just begun to 
fight. Learning that a force of Texan volunteers was 
mobilizing upon the San Jacinto, the "Napoleon of the 
West," as Santa Anna modestly described himself, de- 
cided to delay his departure long enough to invade the 
country north of Galveston and put the finishing touches 
to the subjugation of Texas by means of a final carnival 
of blood and fire. Theoretically, everything favored the 



114 Some Forgotten Heroes 

dictator. He had money; he had ample supplies of 
arms and ammunition; he had a force of trained and 
seasoned veterans far outnumbering any with which the 
Texans could oppose him. It was to be a veritable pic- 
nic of a campaign, a sort of butchers' holiday. In mak- 
ing his plans, however, Santa Anna failed to take a cer- 
tain person into consideration. The name of that per- 
son was Sam Houston. 

The chronicles of our frontier record the name of no 
more picturesque and striking figure than Houston. 
The fertile brain of George A. Henty could not have made 
to order a more satisfactory or wholly improbable hero. 
Though his exploits are a part of history, they read like 
the wildest fiction. That is why, perhaps, the dry-as- 
dust historians make so little mention of him. The 
incidents in his life would provide a motion-picture com- 
pany with material for years. Born in the Blue Ridge 
Mountains of Virginia, his father, who had been an officer 
in the Revolution, answered to the last roll-call when 
young Sam had barely entered his teens. The support 
of a large and growing family thus falling upon the 
energetic shoulders of Mrs. Houston, she packed her 
household goods in a prairie-schooner and moved with 
her children to Tennessee, then upon the very edge of 
civilization. Here Sam, who had learned his "three 
R's" in such poor schools as the Virginia of those early 
days afforded, attended a local academy for a time. 
Translations of the classics having fallen into his hands, 
his imagination was captured by the exploits of the 
heroes of antiquity, and he asked permission of the prin- 
cipal to study Latin, which, for some unexplainable 
reason, was curtly refused him. Whereupon he walked 
out of the academy, declaring that he would never re- 
peat another lesson. 



Under the Flag of the Lone Star 115 

His family, who had scant sympathy with his romantic 
fancies, procured him a job as clerk in a crossroads store. 
Within a fortnight he was missing. After some months 
of anxiety his relatives learned that he was living among 
the Cherokee Indians across the Tennessee. When one 
of his brothers attempted to induce him to return home, 
young Sam answered that he preferred measuring deer 
tracks to measuring tape, and that, if he was not per- 
mitted to study Latin in the academy, he could at least 
dig it out for himself in the freedom of the woods. Hous- 
ton dwelt for several years with his Cherokee friends, 
eventually being adopted as a son by the chieftain 
Oolooteka. Upon the outbreak of our second war 
with Great Britain he enlisted in the American army. 
Though his friends remonstrated with him for entering 
the army as a private soldier, his mother was made of 
different stuff. As he was leaving for the front she took 
down his father's rifle and, with tear-dimmed eyes, 
handed it to her son. "Here, my boy," she said bravely, 
though her voice quavered, "take this rifle and never 
disgrace it. Remember that I would rather that all 
my sons should lie in honorable graves than that one of 
them should turn his back to save his life. Go, and 
God be with you, but never forget that, while my door 
is always open to brave men, it is always shut to cow- 
ards." 

Houston quickly climbed the ladder of promotion, 
obtaining a commission within a year after he had en- 
listed as a private. He first showed the stern stuff of 
which he was made when taking part in General Jack- 
son's campaign against the Creek Indians. His thigh 
pierced by an arrow during the storming of the Indian 
breastworks at Tohopeka, Houston asked a fellow officer 



ii6 Some Forgotten Heroes 

to draw it out. But it was sunk so deeply in the flesh 
that the attempt to extract it brought on an alarming 
flow of blood, whereupon the officer refused to proceed, 
fearing that Houston would bleed to death. Thereupon 
the fiery youngster drew his sword. "Draw it out or 
I'll run you through!" he said. Out the arrow came. 
General Jackson, who had witnessed the incident and 
had noted the seriousness of the young officer's wound, 
ordered him to the rear, but Houston, mindful of his 
mother's parting injunction, disregarded the order and 
plunged again into the thick of the battle. It was a 
breach of discipline, however, to which Andrew Jackson 
shut his eyes. 

Opportunity once more knocked loudly at young 
Houston's door when the Creeks made their final stand 
at Horseshoe Bend. After the main body of the In- 
dians had been destroyed, a party of warriors barricaded 
themselves in a log cabin built over a ravine in such a 
situation that the guns could not be brought to bear 
upon it. The place must be taken by storm, and Jack- 
son called for volunteers. Houston was the only man 
who responded. Snatching a rifle from a soldier, he 
shouted, "Come on, men! Follow me!" and dashed 
toward the cabin. But no one had the courage to follow 
him into the ravine of death. Running in zigzags, to 
disconcert the Indian marksmen, he actually reached 
the cabin before he fell with a shattered arm and two 
rifle-bullets through his shoulder. It was just the sort 
of deed to win the heart of the grim old hero of New 
Orleans, who until his death remained one of Houston's 
stanchest friends. 

Seeing but scant prospects of promotion in the piping 
times of peace which now ensued, Houston resigned from 



Under the Flag of the Lone Star 117 

the army, took up the study of law, and was admitted 
to the bar within a year from the time he opened his first 
law book. He practised for a few years with marked 
success, gave up the law for the more exciting field of 
politics, was elected to Congress when only thirty, and 
four years later became Governor of Tennessee. As the 
result of an unhappy marriage, and deeply wounded by 
the outrageous and baseless accusations made by his 
political opponents, he resigned the governorship and 
went into voluntary exile. In his trouble he turned his 
face toward the wigwam of his adopted father, Ooloo- 
teka, who had become the head chief of his tribe and had 
moved from the banks of the Tennessee to the falls of 
the Arkansas. Though eleven eventful years had 
passed, the old chief's affection for his white son had not 
diminished, and the exile found a warm welcome await- 
ing him in the wigwams and beside the council-fires of 
his adopted people. 

Learning of the frauds by which the Indian agents 
were enriching themselves at the expense of the nation's 
wards, Houston, who had adopted Indian dress, went to 
Washington and laid the facts before Secretary Calhoun, 
who, instead of thanking him, rebuked him for presum- 
ing to appear before him in the dress of an Indian. 
Thereupon Houston turned his back on the secretary, 
and went straight to his old-time friend. President 
Jackson, who promptly saw to it that the guilty officials 
were punished. When the story of Calhoun's criticism 
of Houston's costume was repeated to the President, 
that rough old soldier remarked dryly: "I'm glad there 
is one man of my acquaintance who was made by the 
Almighty and not by the tailor." 

After three years of forest life among the Indians 



ii8 Some Forgotten Heroes 

Houston decided to emigrate to Texas and become a 
ranchman, setting out with a few companions in De- 
cember, 1832, for San Antonio. The romantic story 
of Houston's self-imposed exile had resulted in making 
him a national figure, and the news that he had come 
to Texas spread rapidly among the settlers. Before 
reaching Nacogdoches he learned that he had been 
unanimously elected a member of the convention which 
had been called to meet at Austin in the spring of 
1833 to draft a constitution for Texas. From that 
time onward his story is that of his adopted country. 
When the rupture with Mexico came, in 1835, as a re- 
sult of the attempt to disarm the settlers at Gonzales, 
Houston was chosen commander of the volunteer forces 
to be raised in eastern Texas, and after the battle at the 
Mission of the Immaculate Conception he was appointed 
commander-in-chief of the Texan army. 

When Santa Anna, flushed by his bloody successes 
at the Alamo and Goliad, started to invade central 
Texas, in the spring of 1836, Houston, who had been able 
to raise a force of barely five hundred untrained and ill- 
armed men, sullenly retreated before the advance of 
the dictator. On the i8th of April, however, his plan 
of campaign was suddenly reversed by the capture of 
two Mexicans, from whom he learned what he had not 
positively known before: that Santa Anna himself was 
with the advance column and that he was temporarily 
cut off from the other divisions of his army. The chance 
for which Houston was waiting had come, and he seized 
it before it could get away. If Texas was to be free, if 
the Lone Star flag and not the flag with the emblem of 
the serpent and the buzzard was to wave over the region 
above the Rio Grande, it was now or never. 



Under the Flag of the Lone Star 119 

There were no half-way measures with Sam Houston; 
he determined to stake everything upon a single throw. 
If he won, Texas would be free; if he lost, he and his men 
could only go down fighting, as their fellows had gone 
before them. Pushing on to a point near the mouth of 
the San Jacinto, where it empties into the Bay of Gal- 
veston, he carefully selected the spot for his last stand, 
mounted the two brass cannon known as "the Twin 
Sisters," which had been presented to the Texans by 
Northern sympathizers, and sat down to wait for the 
coming of "the Napoleon of the West." On the morn- 
ing of the 20th of April his pickets fell back before the 
Mexican advance, and the two great antagonists, 
Houston and Santa Anna, at last found themselves face 
to face. The dictator had with him fifteen hundred 
men; Houston had less than half that number — but the 
Texans boasted that "two to one was always fair." 

At daybreak on the 21st Houston sent for his chief 
of scouts, the famous Deaf Smith, and ordered him to 
choose a companion, take axes, and secretly destroy the 
bridge across the San Jacinto. As the bridge was the 
only means of retreat for miles around, this drastic step 
meant utter destruction to the conquered. Talk about 
Cortes burning his boats behind him ! He showed not a 
whit more courage than did Houston when he destroyed 
the bridge across the San Jacinto. At 3 o'clock in the 
afternoon he quietly paraded his little army behind the 
low range of hills which screened them from the enemy, 
who were still drowsing in their customary siesta. At 
this psychological moment Deaf Smith, following to the 
letter the instructions Houston had given him, tore up 
on a reeking horse, waving his axe above his head, and 
shouted: "Vince's Bridge is down! We've got to fight 



I20 Some Forgotten Heroes 

or drown !" That was the word for which Houston had 
been waiting. Instantly he ordered his whole line to ad- 
vance. The only music of the Texans was a fife and a 
drum, the musicians playing them into action to the rol- 
licking tune of "Come to the Bower." And it was no 
bower of roses, either. As they swept into view, rifles at 
the trail and moving at the double, the Mexicans, though 
startled at the unexpectedness of the attack, met them 
with a raking fire of musketry. But the sight of the 
brown-faced men, and of the red-white-and-green banner 
which flaunted above them, infuriated the Texans to the 
point of frenzy. Losing all semblance of formation, they 
raced forward as fast as they could put foot to ground. 

In front of them rode the herculean Houston, a strik- 
ing figure on his white horse. "Come on, boys!" he 
thundered. "Get at 'em! Get at 'em! Texans, 
Texans, follow me!" And follow him they did, surging 
forward with the irresistibility of a tidal wave. "Re- 
member the Alamo!" they roared. "Remember Go- 
liad ! Remember Travis ! Remember Jim Bowie ! Re- 
member Davy Crockett ! " 

In the face of the maddened onslaught the Mexican 
line crumbled like a hillside before the stream from a 
hydraulic nozzle. Before the demoralized Mexicans 
had time to realize what had happened the Texans were 
in their midst. Many of them were "two-gun men," 
who fought with a pistol in each hand — and at every 
shot a Mexican fell. Others avenged the murdered 
Bowie with the wicked knife which bore his name, 
slashing and ripping and stabbing with the long, savage 
blades until they looked like poleaxe men in an abattoir. 
In vain the terrified Mexicans threw down their arms 
and fell upon their knees, pattering out prayers in Span- 



Under the Flag of the Lone Star 121 

ish and calling in their broken English: "Me no Alamo ! 
Me no Goliad!" Within five minutes after the Texans 
had come to hand-grips with their foe the battle had 
turned into a slaughter. Houston was shot through 
the ankle and his horse was dying, but man and horse 
struggled on. Deaf Smith drove his horse into the thick 
of the fight and, as it fell dead beneath him, he turned 
his long-barrelled rifle into a war-club and literally 
smashed his way through the Mexican line, leaving a 
trail of men with broken skulls behind him. An old 
frontiersman named Curtis went into action carrying 
two guns. "The greasers killed my son and my son- 
in-law at the Alamo, and I'm going to get two of 'em 
before I die," he shouted. 

In fifteen minutes the battle of the San Jacinto was 
over, and all that was left of Santa Anna's army of in- 
vasion was a panic-stricken mob of fugitives flying 
blindly across the prairie. Hard on their heels galloped 
the Texan cavalry, cutting down the stragglers with their 
sabres and herding the bulk of the flying army toward 
the river as cow-punchers herd cattle into a corral. 
And the bridge was gone! Before the Mexicans rolled 
the deep and turbid San Jacinto; coming up behind 
them were the blood-crazed Texans. It was death on 
either hand. Some of them spurred their horses into 
the river, only to be picked off with rifle-bullets as they 
tried to swim across. Others threw down their weapons 
and waited stolidly for the fatal stroke or shot. It was 
a bloody business. Modern history records few, if 
any, more sweeping victories. Of Santa Anna's army 
of something over fifteen hundred men, six hundred and 
thirty were killed, two hundred and eight wounded, 
and seven hundred and thirty taken prisoners. 



122 Some Forgotten Heroes 

The finishing touch was put to Houston's triumph 
on the following morning when a scouting party, scour- 
ing the prairie in search of fugitives, discovered a man 
in the uniform of a private soldier attempting to escape 
on hands and knees through the high grass. He was 
captured and marched nine miles to the Texan camp, 
plodding on foot in the dust in front of his mounted 
captors. When he lagged one of them would prick 
him with his lance point until he broke into a run. As 
the Texans rode into camp with their panting and ex- 
hausted captive, the Mexican prisoners excitedly ex- 
claimed: "£/ Presidente! El Presidente!" It was 
Santa Anna, dictator of Mexico — a prisoner In the hands 
of the men whom he had boasted that he would make 
fugitives, prisoners, or corpses. Lying under the tree 
where he had spent the night, the wounded Houston 
received the surrender of "the Napoleon of the West." 
The war of independence was over. Texas was a repub- 
lic in fact as well as in name, and the hero of the San 
Jacinto became its president. The defenders of the 
Alamo and Goliad were avenged. From the Sabine to 
the Rio Grande the Lone Star flag flew free. 



THE PREACHER WHO RODE FOR AN EMPIRE 



In the second quarter of the nineteenth century the 
territory which now comprises the great northwestern 
corner of the United States was a sort of No Man's Land. 
Its few white settlers were about evenly divided between 
Americans and English. A rumor reached Doctor Marcus 
Whitman, an American missionary on the Columbia, that 
the government of the United States, ignorant of the 
enormous value of this region, was about to cede it to 
England. With almost superhuman daring he rode across 
the continent in the depths of winter, laid the facts before 
President Tyler, and obtained his approval of a plan to 
lead a large party of American settlers overland to the 
Columbia. Whitman put his plan into execution; the new 
settlers established themselves in the disputed territory, 
and the territory which comprises the present states of 
Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and a portion of Montana, 
was saved for the Union. 



THE PREACHER WHO RODE FOR AN EMPIRE 

This is the forgotten story of the greatest ride. The 
history of the nation has been punctuated with other 
great rides, it is true. Paul Revere rode thirty miles to 
rouse the Middlesex minutemen and save from capture 
the guns and powder stored at Concord; Sheridan rode 
the twenty miles from Winchester to Cedar Creek and 
by his thunderous "Turn, boysj turn — we're going 
back!" saved the battle — and the names of them both 
are immortalized in verse that is more enduring than 
bronze. Whitman, the missionary, rode four thousand 
miles and saved us an empire, and his name Is not known 
at all. 

Though there were other actors in the great drama 
which culminated in the grim old preacher's memorable 
ride — suave, frock-coated diplomats and furtive secret 
agents and sun-bronzed, leather-shirted frontiersmen 
and bearded factors of the fur trade — the story right- 
fully begins and ends with Indians. There were four 
of them, all chieftains, and the beaded patterns on their 
garments of fringed buckskin and the fashion in which 
they wore the feathers in their hair told the plainsmen 
as plainly as though they had been labelled that they 
were listened to with respect in the councils of the Flat- 
head tribe, whose tepees were pitched in the far no»'west. 
They rode their lean and wiry ponies up the dusty, 
unpaved thoroughfare in St. Louis known as Broadway 
one afternoon in the late autumn of 1832. Though the 
St. Louis of three-quarters of a century ago was but an 

125 



126 Sof}te Forgotten Heroes 

outpost on civilization's firing-line and its six thousand 
inhabitants were accustomed to seeing the strange, wild 
figures of the plains, the sudden appearance of these 
Indian braves, who came riding out of nowhere, clad in 
all the barbaric panoply of their rank, caused a distinct 
flutter of curiosity. 

The news of their arrival being reported to General 
Clarke, the military commandant, he promptly assumed 
the ciceronage of the bewildered but impassive red men. 
Having, as it chanced, been an Indian commissioner in 
his earlier years, he knew the tribe well and could speak 
with them in their own guttural tongue. Beyond vouch- 
safing the information that they came from the upper 
reaches of the Columbia, from the country known as 
Oregon, and that they had spent the entire summer and 
autumn upon their journey, the Indians, with character- 
istic reticence, gave no explanation of the purpose of 
their visit. After some days had passed, however, they 
confided to General Clarke that rumors had filtered 
through to their tribe of the white man's Book of 
Life, and that they had been sent to seek it. To a 
seasoned old frontiersman like the general, this was a 
novel proposition to come from a tribe of remote and 
untamed Indians. He treated the emissaries, never- 
theless, with the utmost hospitality, taking them to 
dances and such other entertainments as the limited 
resources of the St. Louis of those days a;fi^orded, and, 
being himself a devout Catholic, to his own church. 

Thus passed the winter, during which two of the 
chiefs died, as a result, no doubt, of the indoor life and 
the unaccustomed richness of the food. When the 
tawny prairies became polka-dotted with bunch-grass in 
the spring, the two survivors made preparations for 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 127 

their departure, but, before they left, General Clarke, 
who had taken a great liking to these dignified and in- 
telligent red men, insisted on giving them a farewell 
banquet. After the dinner the elder of the chiefs was 
called upon for a speech. You must picture him as 
standing with folded arms, tall, straight and of command- 
ing presence, at the head of the long table, a most dra- 
matic and impressive figure in his garments of quill- 
embroidered buckskin, with an eagle feather slanting in 
his hair. He spoke with the guttural but sonorous 
eloquence of his people, and after each period General 
Clarke translated what he had said to the attentive 
audience of army officers, government officials, priests, 
merchants, and traders who lined the table. 

"I have come to you, my brothers," he began, "over 
the trail of many moons from out of the setting sun. 
You were the friends of my fathers, who have all gone 
the long way. I have come with an eye partly open for 
my people, who sit in darkness. I go back with both 
eyes closed. How can I go back blind, to my blind 
people? I made my way to you with strong arms 
through many enemies and strange lands that I might 
carry much back to them. I go back with both arms 
broken and empty. Two fathers came with us; they 
were the braves of many winters and wars. We leave 
them asleep here by your great water and wigwams. 
They were tired in many moons, and their moccasins 
wore out. 

"My people sent me to get the white man's Book of 
Life. You took me to where you allow your women to 
dance as we do not ours, and the Book was not there. 
You took me to where they worship the Great Spirit 
with candles, and the Book was not there. You showed 



128 Some Forgotten Heroes 

me images of the good spirits and pictures of the good 
land beyond, but the Book was not among them to tell 
us the way. I am going back the long and sad trail to 
my people in the dark land. You make my feet heavy 
with gifts, and my moccasins will grow old in carrying 
them; yet the Book is not among them. When I tell 
my poor, blind people, after one more snow, in the big 
council that I did not bring the Book, no word will be 
spoken by our old men or by our young braves. One 
by one they will rise up and go out in silence. My 
people will die in darkness, and they will go on a long 
path to other hunting-grounds. No white man will go 
with them and no white man's Book to make the way 
plain. I have no more words." 

Just as the rude eloquence of the appeal touched the 
hearts of the frontier dwellers who sat about the table 
in St. Louis, so, when it was translated and published 
in the Eastern papers, it touched the hearts and fired 
the imaginations of the nation. In a ringing editorial 
The Christian Advocate asked: "Who will respond to go 
beyond the Rocky Mountains and carry the Book of 
Heaven?" And this was the cue for the missionary 
whose name was Marcus Whitman to set foot upon the 
boards of history. 

His preparation for a frontiersman's life began early 
for young Whitman. Born in Connecticut when the 
eighteenth century had all but run its course, he was 
still in his swaddling-clothes when his parents, falling 
victims to the prevalent fever for "going West," piled 
their lares and penates into an ox-cart and trekked 
overland to the fertile lake region of central New York, 
Mrs. Whitman making the four-hundred-mile journey 
on foot, with her year-old babe in her arms. Building 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 129 

a cabin with the tree-trunks cleared from the site, they 
began the usual pioneer's struggle for existence. His 
father dying before he had reached his teens, young 
Marcus was sent to live with his grandfather in Plain- 
field, Mass., where he remained ten years, learning his 
"three R's" in such schools as the place afforded, his 
education later being taken in hand by the local parson. 

His youth was passed in the usual life of the country 
boy; to drive home the cows and milk them, to chop the 
wood and carry the water and do the other household 
chores, and, later on, to plough and plant the fields — a 
training which was to prove invaluable to him in after 
years, on the shores of another ocean. I expect that 
the strong, sturdy boy of ceaseless activity and indomi- 
table will — the Plainfield folk called him mischievous 
and stubborn — who was fonder of hunting and fishing 
than of algebra and Greek, must have caused his old 
grandfather a good deal of worry; though, from all I 
can learn, he seems to have been a straightforward and 
likable youngster. 

Very early he set his heart on entering the ministry; 
but, owing to the dissuasions of his relatives and friends, 
who knew how pitifully meagre was a clergyman's 
living in those days, he reluctantly abandoned the idea 
and took up instead the study of medicine. After 
practising in Canada for several years, he returned to 
central New York, where, with but little help, he chopped 
a farm out of the wilderness, cleared it, and cultivated 
it, built a grist-mill and a sawmill, and at the same time 
acted as physician for a district fifty miles in radius. 

He was in the heyday of life, prosperous, and engaged 
to the prettiest girl in all the countryside, when, reading 
in the local paper the appeal made by the Indian chief- 



130 Some Forgotten Heroes 

tains in far-away St. Louis, the old crusading fervor 
that had first turned his thoughts toward the ministry, 
flamed up clear and strong within him, and, putting com- 
fort, prosperity, everything behind him, he applied 
to the American Board for appointment as a mission- 
ary to Oregon. Such a request from a man so pecu- 
liarly qualified for a wilderness career as Whitman could 
not well be disregarded, and in due time he received an 
appointment to go to the banks of the Columbia, inves- 
tigate, return, and report. The wish of his life had been 
granted: he had become a skirmisher In the army of the 
church. 

Accompanied by a fellow missionary. Whitman pene- 
trated into the Western wilderness as far as the Wind 
River Mountains, near the present Yellowstone Park. 
After familiarizing themselves through talks with trad- 
ers, trappers, and Indians with the conditions which 
prevailed in the valley of the Columbia, Whitman and 
his companion returned to Boston, and upon the strength 
of their report the American Board decided to lose no 
time in occupying the field. Ordered to establish a 
station on the Columbia, in the vicinity of Fort Walla 
Walla, then a post of the Hudson's Bay Company, 
Whitman turned the long and arduous trip across the 
continent into a wedding journey. 

The conveyances used and the roundabout route 
taken by the bridal couple strikingly emphasize the 
primitive internal communications of the period. They 
drove in a sleigh from Elmira, N. Y., to Hollidaysburg, 
a hamlet on the Pennsylvania Canal, at the foot of the 
Alleghanles, the canal-boats, which were built in sec- 
tions, being taken over the mountains on a railway. 
Travelling by the canal and Its communicating water- 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 131 

ways to the Ohio, they journeyed by steamboat down the 
Ohio to its junction with the Mississippi, up the Missis- 
sippi to St. Louis, and thence up the Missouri to Coun- 
cil Bluffs, where they bought a wagon (bear that wagon 
in mind, if you please, for you shall hear of it later on), 
and outfitted for the journey across the plains. Ac- 
companied by another missionary couple. Doctor and 
Mrs. Spalding, they turned the noses of their mules 
northwestward and a week or so later caught up with 
an expedition sent out by the American Fur Company to 
its settlement of Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia. 
Following the North Fork of the Platte, they crossed 
the Wind River Mountains within sight of the landmark 
which came in time to be known as Fremont's Peak, 
though these two young couples crossed the Great Di- 
vide six years before Fremont, "the pathfinder," ever 
set eyes upon it. Few women of our race have ever 
made so perilous or difficult a journey. Before it was 
half completed, the party, owing to a miscalculation, 
ran out of flour and for weeks on end were forced to 
live on jerked buffalo meat and tea. Crossing the Snake 
River at a point where it was upward of a mile in width, 
the wagon was capsized by the velocity of the current, 
and the mules, on which the women had been put for 
safety, becoming entangled in the harness, their riders 
escaped drowning by what the missionaries devoutly 
ascribed to a miracle and the rough-spoken frontiers- 
men to "damned good luck." Another river they 
crossed by means of a dried elkskin with two ropes 
attached, on which they lay flat and perfectly motion- 
less while two Indian women, holding the ropes in their 
teeth, swam the stream, drawing this unstable ferry 
behind them. 



132 Some Forgotten Heroes 

At Fort Hall, near the present site of Pocatello, 
Idaho, they came upon the southernmost of that chain 
of trading-posts with which the Hudson's Bay Company 
sought to guard the enonnous territory which, without 
so much as a "by your leave," it had taken for its own. 
Here Captain Grant, the company's factor, made a 
determined effort to induce Whitman to abandon the 
wagon that he had brought with him across the conti- 
nent in the face of almost insuperable obstacles. But 
the obstinacy that had caused the folks in Plainfield to 
shake their heads when the name of young Marcus Whit- 
man was mentioned now stood him in good stead, for 
the more persistent the Englishman became in his ob- 
jections the more adamantine grew the American in his 
determination to cling at all costs to his wagon, for no 
one knew better than Whitman that this had proved 
the most successful of the methods pursued by the great 
British fur monopoly to discourage the colonization 
of the territory wherein it conducted its operations. 

The oflEicials of the Hudson's Bay Company well knew 
that the colonization of the valley of the Columbia 
by Americans meant not only the end of their enor- 
mously profitable monopoly but the end of British 
domination in that region. Though they did not have 
it in their power to forcibly prevent Americans from 
entering the country, they argued that there could be 
no colonization on a large scale unless the settlers had 
wagons in which to transport their seeds and farming 
implements. Hence the company adopted the policy 
of stationing its agents along the main routes of travel 
with instructions to stop at nothing short of force to 
detain the wagons. And until Marcus Whitman came 
this policy had accomplished the desired result, the 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 133 

specious arguments of Captain Grant having proved 
so successful, indeed, that the stockade at Fort Hall 
was filled with abandoned wagons and farming imple- 
ments which would have been of inestimable value to 
the settlers who had been persuaded or bullied into 
leaving them behind. 

But Whitman was made of different stuflF, and the 
English official might as well have tried to argue the 
Snake River out of its course as to argue this hard- 
headed Yankee into giving up his wagon. Though it 
twice capsized and was all but lost in the swollen streams, 
though once it fell over a precipice and more than once 
went rolling down a mountainside, though for miles on 
end it was held on the narrow, winding mountain trails 
by means of drag-ropes, and though it became so dilapi- 
dated in time that it finished its journey on two wheels 
instead of four, the ramshackle old vehicle, thanks to 
Whitman's bulldog grit and determination, was hauled 
over the mountains and was the first vehicle to enter 
the forbidden land. I have laid stress upon this inci- 
dent of the wagon, because, as things turned out, it 
proved a vital factor in the winning of Oregon. "For 
want of a nail the shoe was lost," runs the ancient 
doggerel; "for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for 
want of a horse the rider was lost; for want of a rider 
the kingdom was lost." And, had it not been for this 
decrepit old wagon of Whitman's, a quarter of a million 
square miles of the most fertile land between the oceans 
would have been lost to the Union. 

Seven months after helping his bride into the sleigh 
at Elmira, Whitman drove his gaunt mule-team into the 
gate of the stockade at Fort Walla Walla. To-day one 
can make that same journey in a little more than four 



134 Some Forgotten Heroes 

days and sit in a green plush chair all the way. The 
news of Whitman's coming had preceded him, and an 
enormous concourse of Indians, arrayed in all their 
barbaric finery, was assembled to greet the man who had 
journeyed so many moons to bring them the white 
man's Book of Heaven. Picture that quartet of mis- 
sionaries — skirmishers of the church, pickets of progress, 
advance-guards of civilization — as they stood on the 
banks of the Columbia one September morning in 1836 
and consulted as to how to begin the work they had been 
sent to do. It was all new. There were no precedents 
to guide them. How would you begin, my friends, were 
you suddenly set down in the middle of a wilderness four 
thousand miles from home, with instructions to Chris- 
tianize and civilize the savages who inhabited it ? 

Whitman, in whom diplomacy lost an adept when he 
became a missionary, appreciated that the first thing 
for him to do, if he was to be successful in his mission, 
was to win the confidence of the ruling powers of Ore- 
gon — the Hudson's Bay Company officials at Fort Van- 
couver. This necessitated another journey of three 
hundred miles, but it could be made in canoes with 
Indian paddlers. Doctor McLoughlin, the stern old 
Scotchman who was chief factor of the Hudson's Bay 
Company and whose word was law throughout a region 
larger than all the States east of the Mississippi put 
together, had to be able, from the very nature of his 
business, to read the characters of men as students read 
a book; and he was evidently pleased with what he read 
in the face of the American missionary, for he gave both 
permission and assistance in establishing a mission sta- 
tion at Waiilatpui, twenty-five miles from Walla Walla. 

Whitman's first move in his campaign for the civiliza- 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 135 

tion of the Indians was to induce them to build perma- 
nent homes and to plough and sow. This the Hudson's 
Bay officials had always discouraged. They did not 
want their savage allies to be transformed into tillers 
of the soil; they wanted them to remain nomads and 
hunters, ready to move hundreds of miles in quest of 
furs. The only parallels in modern times to the greed, 
selfishness, and cruelty which characterized the admin- 
istration of the Hudson's Bay Company have been the 
rule of the Portuguese in Mozambique and Angola and 
of King Leopold in the Congo. 

At this time Oregon was a sort of no man's land, to 
which neither England nor the United States had laid 
definite claim, though the former, realizing the immen- 
sity of its natural resources and the enormous strategic 
value that would accrue from its possession, had long 
cast covetous eyes upon it. The Americans of that 
period, on the contrary, knew little about Oregon and 
cared less, regarding the proposals for its acquisition 
with the same distrust with which the Americans of 
to-day regard any suggestion for extending our bound- 
aries below the Rio Grande. 

Daniel Webster had said on the floor of the United 
States Senate: "What do we want with this vast, worth- 
less area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of 
shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and 
prairie-dogs ? To what use could we ever hope to put 
these great deserts or these endless mountain ranges, 
impenetrable and covered to their base with eternal 
snow? What can we ever hope to do with the western 
coast, a coast of three thousand miles, rock-bound, 
cheerless, and uninviting, and not a harbor on it ? Mr. 
President, I will never vote one cent from the public 



136 Some Forgotten Heroes 

treasury to place the Pacific coast one inch nearer to 
Boston." 

The name Oregon, it must be borne in mind, had a 
very much broader significance then than now, for the 
territory generally considered to be referred to by the 
term comprised the whole of the present States of Ore- 
gon, Washington, and Idaho, and a portion of Mon- 
tana. 

Notwithstanding the systematic efforts of the Hud- 
son's Bay Company to keep them out, a considerable 
number of Americans — perhaps two or three hundred 
in all — had settled in the country watered by the Colum- 
bia, but they were greatly outnumbered by the Cana- 
dians and British, who held the balance of power. The 
American settlers believed that, under the terms of 
the treaty of 1819, whichever nation settled and organ- 
ized the territory that nation would hold it. Though 
this was not directly aflfirmed in the terms of that treaty, 
it was the common sentiment of the statesmen of the 
period, Webster, then Secretary of State, having said, 
in the course of a letter to the British minister at Wash- 
ington: "The ownership of the whole country (Oregon) 
will likely follow the greater settlement and larger 
amount of population." 

The missionaries, recognizing the incalculable value 
of the country which the American Government was 
deliberately throwing away, did everything in their 
power to encourage immigration. Their glowing ac- 
counts of the fertility of the soil, the balmy climate, the 
wealth of timber, the incalculable water-power, the 
wealth in minerals, had each year induced a limited 
number of daring souls to make the perilous and costly 
journey across the plains. In the autumn of 1842 a 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 137 

much larger party than any that had hitherto attempted 
the journey — one hundred and twenty in all — reached 
Waiilatpui. Among them was a highly educated and 
unusually well-informed man — General Amos Lovejoy. 
He was thoroughly posted in national affairs, and it was 
in the course of a conversation with him that Doctor 
Whitman first learned that the Webster- Ashbur ton 
treaty would probably be ratified before the adjourn- 
ment of Congress in the following March. It was gen- 
erally believed that this treaty related to the entire 
boundary between the United States and England's 
North American possessions, the popular supposition 
being that it provided for the cession of the Oregon 
region to Great Britain in return for fishing rights off 
the coast of Newfoundland. 

Doctor Whitman instantly saw that, as a result of 
the incredible ignorance and short-sightedness of the 
statesmen — or, rather, the politicians who paraded as 
statesmen — at Washington, this great, rich territory 
was quietly slipping away from us without a protest. 
There was but one thing to do in such a crisis. He must 
set out for Washington. Though four thousand miles 
of Indian-haunted wilderness lay between him and the 
white city on the Potomac, he did not hesitate. Though 
winter was at hand, and the passes would be deep in 
snow and the plains destitute of pasturage, he did not 
falter. Though there was a rule of the American Board 
that no missionary could leave his post without obtain- 
ing permission from headquarters in Boston, Whitman 
shouldered all the responsibility. "I did not expatriate 
myself when I became a missionary," was his reply to 
some objection. "Even if the Board dismisses me, I 
will do what I can to save Oregon to the nation. My 



138 Some Forgotten Heroes 

life is of but little worth if I can keep this country for 
the American people." * 

Whitman's friends in Oregon felt that he was starting 
on a ride into the valley of the shadow of death. They 
knew from their own experiences the terrible hardships 
of such a journey even in summer, when there was grass 
to feed the horses and men could live with comfort in 
the open air. It was resolved that he must not make 
the journey alone, and a call was made for a volunteer 
to accompany him, whereupon General Amos Lovejoy 
stepped forward and said quietly: "I will go with Doctor 
Whitman." 

The doctor planned to start in five days, but, while 
dining with the Hudson's Bay officials at Fort Walla 
Walla, an express messenger of the company arrived 
from Fort Colville, three hundred and fifty miles up the 
Columbia, and electrified his audience by announcing 
that a party of one hundred and forty British and Cana- 
dian colonists were on the road to Oregon. A young 
English clergyman, carried away with enthusiasm, 
sprang to his feet, waved his napkin above his head and 
shouted: "We've got the country — the Yankees are too 
late! Hurrah for Oregon!" Whitman, appreciating 
that things had now reached a pass where even hours 
were precious, quietly excused himself, hurried back to 



* It is a regrettable fact that this, one of the finest episodes in our national 
history, from being a subject of honest controversy has degenerated into an 
embittered and rancorous quarrel, some of Doctor Whitman's detractors, not 
content with questioning the motives which animated him in his historic ride, 
having gone so far as to cast doubts on the fact of the ride itself and even to 
assail the character of the great missionary. Full substantiation of the episode 
as I have told it may be found, however, in Barrows's "Oregon, the Struggle 
for Possession," Johnson's "History of Oregon," Dye's "McLoughlin and Old 
Oregon," and Nixon's "How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon," an array of 
authorities which seem to me sufficient. 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 139 

the mission at Waiilatpui, and made preparations for 
an immediate departure. The strictest secrecy was 
enjoined upon all the Americans whom Whitman had 
taken into his confidence, for had a rumor of his inten- 
tions reached British ears at this juncture it might have 
ruined everything. So it was given out that he was 
returning to Boston to advise the American Board 
against the contemplated removal of its missions in 
Oregon — an explanation which was true as far as it went. 

On the morning of October 3, 1842, Whitman, saying 
good-by to his wife and home, climbed into his saddle 
and with General Lovejoy, their half-breed guide, and 
three pack-mules set out on the ride that was to win us 
an empire. The litde group of American missionaries 
and settlers whom he left behind gave him a rousing 
cheer as he rode off and then stood in silence with 
choking throats and misted eyes until the heroic doctor 
and his companions were swallowed by the forest. 

With horses fresh, they reached Fort Hall in eleven 
days, where the English factor. Captain Grant— the 
same man who, six years before, had attempted to pre- 
vent Whitman from taking his wagon into Oregon — 
possibly guessing at their mission, did his best to detain 
them. Learning at Fort Hall that the northern tribes 
were on the war-path. Whitman and his companions 
struck southward in the direction of Great Salt Lake, 
planning to work from there eastward, via Fort Uintah 
and Fort Uncompahgre, to Santa Fe, and thence by the 
Santa Fe trail to St. Louis, which was on the borders of 
civilization. 

The journey from Fort Hall to Fort Uintah was one 
long nightmare, the temperature falling at times to forty 
degrees below zero and the snow being so deep in places 



I40 Some Forgotten Heroes 

that the horses could scarcely struggle through. While 
crossing the mountains on their way to Taos they were 
caught in a blinding snow-storm, in which, with badly 
frozen limbs, they wandered aimlessly for hours. 
Finally upon the guide admitting that he was lost and 
could go no farther, they sought refuge in a deep ravine. 
Whitman dismounted and, kneeling in the snow, prayed 
for guidance. Can't you picture the scene: the lonely, 
rock- walled gorge; the shivering animals standing de- 
jectedly, heads to the ground and reins trailing; the 
general, muffled to the eyes in furs; the impassive, blank- 
eted half-breed; in the centre, upon his knees, the indom- 
itable missionary, praying to the God of storms; and the 
snowflakes falling swiftly, silently, upon everything? 
As though in answer to the doctor's prayers the lead- 
mule, which had been left to himself, suddenly started 
plunging through the snow-drifts as though on an urgent 
errand. Whereupon the guide called out: "This old 
mule'll find the way back to camp if he kin live long 
'nough to git there." And he did. 

The next morning the guide said flatly that he would 
go no farther. 

" I know this country," he declared, "an' I know when 
things is possible an' when they ain't. It ain't possible 
to git through, an' it's plumb throwin' your lives away 
to try it. I'm finished." 

This was a staggering blow for Whitman, for he was 
already ten days behind his schedule. But he was far 
from being beaten. Telling Lovejoy to remain in camp 
and recuperate the animals — ^which he did by feeding 
them on brush and the inner bark of willows, for there 
was no other fodder — Whitman turned back to Fort Un- 
compahgre, where he succeeded in obtaining a stouter- 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 141 

hearted guide. In a week he had rejoined Lovejoy. The 
storm had ceased, and with rested animals they made 
good progress over the mountains to the pyramid pueblo 
of Taos, the home of Kit Carson. Tarrying there but 
a few hours, worn and weary though they were, they 
pressed on to the banks of the Red River, a stream which 
is dangerous even in summer, only to find a fringe of 
solid ice upon each shore, with a rushing torrent, two 
hundred feet wide, between. For some minutes the 
guide studied it in silence. " It's too dangerous to cross," 
he said at last decisively. 

"Dangerous or not, we must cross it, and at once," 
answered Whitman. Cutting a stout willow pole, eight 
feet or so in length, he put it on his shoulder and re- 
mounted. 

"Now, boys," he ordered, "shove me off." Follow- 
ing the doctor's directions, Lovejoy and the guide urged 
the trembling beast onto the slippery ice and then gave 
him a sudden shove which sent him, much against his 
will, into the freezing water. Both horse and rider re- 
mained for a moment out of sight, then rose to the sur- 
face well toward the middle of the stream, the horse 
swimming desperately. As they reached the opposite 
bank the doctor's ingenuity in providing himself with 
the pole quickly became apparent, for with it he broke 
the fringe of ice and thus enabled his exhausted horse 
to gain a footing and scramble ashore. Wood was 
plentiful, and he soon had a roaring fire. In a wild 
country, when one animal has gone ahead the others 
will always follow, so the general and the guide had no 
great difficulty in inducing their horses and pack-mules 
to make the passage of the river, rejoining Whitman 
upon the opposite bank. 



142 Some Forgotten Heroes 

Despite the fact that they found plenty of wood along 
the route that they had taken, which was fully a thou- 
sand miles longer than the northern course would have 
been, all the party were severely frozen. Whitman suffer- 
ing excruciating pain from his frozen ears, hands, and 
feet. The many delays had not only caused the loss of 
precious time, but they had completely exhausted their 
provisions. A dog had accompanied the party, and they 
ate him. A mule came next, and that kept them until 
they reached Santa Fe, where there was plenty. Santa 
Fe — that oldest city of European occupation on the 
continent — welcomed and fed them. 

From there over the famous Santa F6 trail to Bent's 
Fort, a fortified settlement on the Arkansas, was a long 
journey but, compared with what they had already gone 
through, an easy one. A long day's ride northeastward 
from this lonely outpost of American civilization, and 
they found across their path a tributary of the Arkansas. 
On the opposite shore was wood in plenty. On their 
side there was none, and the river was frozen over with 
smooth, clear ice, scarce strong enough to hold a man. 
They must have wood or they would perish from the 
cold; so Whitman, taking the axe, lay flat upon the ice 
and snaked himself across, cut a sufficient supply of fuel 
and returned the way he went, pushing it before him. 
While he was cutting it, however, an unfortunate inci- 
dent occurred: the axe-helve was splintered. This made 
no particular difference at the moment, for the doctor 
wound the break in the handle with a thong of buckskin. 
But when they were in camp that night a famished wolf, 
attracted by the smell of the fresh buckskin, carried off 
axe and all, and they could find no trace of it. Had it 
happened a few hundred miles back it would have meant 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 143 

the failure of the expedition, if not the death of Whitman 
and his companions. On such apparently insignificant 
trifles do the fate of nations sometimes hang. 

Crossing the plains of what are now the States of 
Oklahoma and Kansas, great packs of gaunt, gray timber- 
wolves surrounded their tent each night and were kept 
at bay only at the price of unceasing vigilance, one mem- 
ber of the party always remaining on guard with a loaded 
rifle. The moment a wolf was shot its famished com- 
panions would pounce upon it and tear it to pieces. 
From Bent's Fort to St. Louis was, strangely enough, 
one of the most dangerous portions of the journey, for, 
while heretofore the chief dangers had come from cold, 
starvation, and savage beasts, here they were in hourly 
danger from still more savage men, for in those days the 
Santa Fe trail was frequented by bandits, horse-thieves, 
renegade Indians, fugitives from justice, and the other 
desperate characters who haunted the outskirts of civi- 
lization and preyed upon the unprotected traveller. 
Notwithstanding these dangers, of which he had been 
repeatedly warned at Santa F6 and Bent's Fort, the 
doctor, leaving Lovejoy and the guide to follow him with 
the pack-animals, pushed on through this perilous re- 
gion alone, but lost his way and spent two precious days 
in finding it again — a punishment, he said, for having 
travelled on the Sabbath. 

The only occasion throughout all his astounding jour- 
ney when this man of iron threatened to collapse was 
when, upon reaching St. Louis, in February, 1843, he 
learned, in answer to his eager inquiries, that the Ash- 
burton treaty had been signed on August 9, long before 
he left Oregon, and that it had been ratified by the Sen- 
ate on November 10, while he was floundering in the 



144 Some Forgotten Heroes 

mountain snows near Fort Uncompahgre. For a mo- 
ment the missionary's mahogany-tanned face went white 
and his legs threatened to give way beneath him. Could 
it be that this was the end of his dream of national 
expansion ? Was it possible that his heroic ride had 
been made for naught ? But summoning up his courage 
he managed to ask: "Is the question of the Oregon 
boundary still open ?" When he learned that the treaty 
had only settled the question of a few square miles in 
Maine, and that the matter of the northwest boundary 
was still pending, the revulsion was so great that he 
reeled and nearly fell. God be praised! There was 
still time for him to get to Washington ! The river was 
frozen and he had to depend upon the stage, and an 
overland journey from St. Louis to Washington in mid- 
winter was no light matter. But to Whitman, with 
muscles like steel springs, a thousand miles by stage- 
coach over atrocious roads was not an obstacle worthy 
of discussion. 

He arrived at Washington on the 3d of March — ^just 
five months from the Columbia to the Potomac — in the 
same rough garments he had worn upon his ride, for he 
had neither time nor opportunity to get others. Soiled 
and greasy buckskin breeches, sheepskin chaparejos, 
fleece side out, boot-moccasins of elkskin, a cap of rac- 
coon fur with the tail hanging down behind, frontier 
fashion, and a buffalo greatcoat with a hood for stormy 
weather, composed a costume that did not show one 
inch of woven fabric. His face, storm-tanned to the 
color of a much-smoked meerschaum, carried all the 
iron-gray whiskers that five months' absence from a 
razor could put upon it. 

I doubt, indeed, if the shop-windows of the national 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 145 

capital have ever reflected a more picturesque or strilc- 
ing figure. But he had no time to take note of the sen- 
sation which his appearance created in the streets of 
Washington. Would he be granted an audience with 
the President? Would he be believed? Would his 
mission prove successful? Those were the questions 
that tormented him. 

Those were days when the chief executive of the na- 
tion was hedged by less formality than he is in these 
busier times, and President Tyler promptly received 
him. Some day, perhaps, the people of one of those 
great States formed from the territory which he saved 
to the Union will commission a famous artist to paint a 
picture of that historic meeting: the President, his keen, 
attentive face framed by the flaring collar and high black 
stock of the period, sitting low in his armchair; the great 
Secretary of State, his mane brushed back from his 
tremendous forehead, seated beside him; and, stand- 
ing before them, the preacher-pioneer, bearded to the 
eyes, with frozen limbs, in his worn and torn garments 
of fur and leather, pleading for Oregon. 

The burden of his argument was that the treaty of 
18 1 9 must be immediately abrogated and that the au- 
thority of the United States be extended over the valley 
of the Columbia. He painted in glowing words the limit- 
less resources, the enormous wealth in minerals and tim- 
ber and water-power of this land beyond the Rockies; 
he told his hearers, spellbound now by the interest and 
vividness of the narrative, of the incredible fertility of 
the virgin soil, in which anything would grow; of the 
vastness of the forests ; of the countless leagues of navi- 
gable rivers; of the healthful and delightful climate; of 
the splendid harbors along the coast; the last, but by 



146 Some Forgotten Heroes 

no means least, of those hardy pioneers who had gone 
forth to settle this rich new region at peril of their lives 
and who, through him, were pleading to be placed under 
the shadow of their own flag. 

But Daniel Webster still clung obstinately to his be- 
lief that Oregon was a wilderness not worth the having. 

"It is impossible to build a wagon-road over the 
mountains," he asserted positively. "My friend Sir 
George Simpson, the British minister, has told me so." 

"There is a wagon-road over the mountains, Mr. 
Secretary," retorted Whitman, "for I have made it." 

It was the rattletrap old prairie-schooner that the mis- 
sionary had dragged into Oregon on two wheels in the 
face of British opposition that clinched and copper- 
riveted the business. It knocked all the argument out 
of the famous Secretary, who, for almost the first time 
in his life, found himself at a loss for an answer. Here 
was a man of a type quite different from any that Web- 
ster had encountered in all his political experience. He 
had no axe to grind; he asked for nothing; he wanted no 
money, or office, or lands, or anything except that which 
would add to the glory of the flag, the prosperity of the 
people, the wealth of the nation. It was a powerful 
appeal to the heart of President Tyler. 

"What you have told us has interested me deeply, 
Doctor Whitman," said the President at length. "Now 
tell me exactly what it is that you wish me to do." 

"If it is true, Mr. President," replied Whitman, 
"that, as Secretary Webster himself has said, 'the 
ownership of Oregon is very likely to follow the greater 
settlement and the larger amount of population,' then 
all I ask is that you won't barter away Oregon or permit 
of British interference until I can organize a company 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 147 

of settlers and lead them across the plains to colonize 
the country. And this I will try to do at once." 

"Your credentials as a missionary vouch for your 
character, Doctor Whitman," replied the President. 
"Your extraordinary ride and your frost-bitten limbs 
vouch for your patriotism. The request you make is a 
reasonable one. I am glad to grant it." 

"That is all I ask," said Whitman, rising. 

The object that had started him on his four-thousand- 
mile journey having been attained, Whitman wasted no 
time in resting. His work was still unfinished. It was 
up to him to get his settlers into Oregon, for the increas- 
ing arrogance of the Hudson's Bay Company confirmed 
him in his belief that the sole hope of saving the 
valley of the Columbia lay in a prompt and overwhelm- 
ing American immigration. He had, indeed, arrived at 
Washington in the very nick of time, for, if prior to his 
arrival the British Government had renewed its offer of 
compromising by taking as the international boundary 
the forty-ninth parallel to the Columbia and thence 
down that river to the Pacific — thus giving the greater 
part of the present State of Washington to England — 
there is but little doubt that the ofifer would have been 
accepted. But the promise made by President Tyler 
to Whitman committed him against taking any action. 

Meanwhile General Lovejoy had been busy upon the 
frontier spreading the news that early in the spring Doc- 
tor Whitman and himself would guide a body of settlers 
across the Rockies to Oregon. The news spread up and 
down the border like fire in dry grass. The start was to 
be made from Weston, not far from where Kansas City 
now stands, and soon the emigrants came pouring in — 
men who had fought the Indians and the wilderness all 



148 Some Forgotten Heroes 

the way from the Great Lakes to the Gulf; men who had 
followed Boone and Bowie and Carson and Davy Crock- 
ett; a hardy, sturdy, tenacious breed who were quite 
ready to fight, if need be, to hold this northwestern land 
where they had determined to build their homes. 

The grass was late, that spring of 1843, and the expe- 
dition did not get under way until the last week in June. 
At Fort Hall they met with the customary discourage- 
ments and threats from Captain Grant, but Whitman, 
like a modern Moses, urged them forward. On pushed 
the winding train of white-topped wagons, crossing the 
sun-baked prairies, climbing the Rockies, fording the 
intervening rivers, creeping along the edge of perilous 
precipices, until at last they stood upon the summit of 
the westernmost range, with the promised land lying 
spread below them. Whitman, the man to whom it was 
all due, reined in his horse and watched the procession 
of wagons, bearing upward of a thousand men, women, 
and children, make its slow progress down the moun- 
tains. He must have been very happy, for he had 
added the great, rich empire which the term Oregon im- 
plied to the Union.* 

For four years more Doctor Whitman continued his 
work of caring for the souls and the bodies of red men 
and white alike at the mission station of Waiilatpui. 
On August 6, 1846, as a direct result of his great ride, 
was signed the treaty whereby England surrendered her 
claims to Oregon. In those days news travelled slowly 
along the frontier, and it was the following spring before 

* Years afterward Daniel Webster remarked to a friend: "It is safe to assert 
that our country owes it to Doctor Whitman and his associate missionaries that 
all the territory west of the Rocky Mountains and north of the Columbia is 
not now owned by England and held by the Hudson's Bay Company." — Dye's 
"McLoughlin and Old Oregon." 



The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire 149 

the British outposts along the Columbia learned that 
the British minister at Washington had been beaten by 
the diplomacy of a Yankee missionary and that the 
great, despotic company which for well-nigh two centu- 
ries had been in undisputed control of this region, and 
which had come to regard it as inalienably Its own, would 
have to move on. From that moment Marcus Whitman 
was a doomed man, for it was a long-standing boast of 
the company that no man defied it — and lived. 

The end came with dramatic suddenness. Early in 
the afternoon of November 20, 1847, Doctor Whitman 
was sitting in the mission station prescribing medicine, 
as was his custom, for those of his Indians who were 
ailing, when a blanketed warrior stole up behind him 
on silent moccasins and buried a hatchet in his brain. 
Then hell broke loose. Whooping fiends in paint and 
feathers appeared as from the pit. Mrs. Whitman was 
butchered as she knelt by her dying husband, their 
scalps being torn from their heads before they had ceased 
to breathe. Fourteen other missionaries were murdered 
by the red-skinned monsters and forty women and chil- 
dren were carried into a captivity that was worse than 
death. And this by the Indians who, just fifteen years 
before, had pleaded to have sent them the white man's 
Book of Heaven! Though no conclusive proof has 
ever been produced that they were whooped on to their 
atrocious deed by emissaries of the great monopoly 
which had been forced out of Oregon as a result of 
Whitman's ride, there is but little doubt that it insti- 
gated the massacre. Whitman had snatched an empire 
from its greedy fingers, and he had to pay the price. 

Though Marcus Whitman added to the national do- 
main a territory larger and possessing greater natural 



150 Some Forgotten Heroes 

resources than the German Empire, though but for him 
Portland and Tacoma and Seattle and Spokane would 
be British instead of American, no memorial of him can 
be found in their parks or public buildings. Instead of 
honoring the man who discovered the streams and 
forests from which they are growing rich, who won for 
them the very lands on which they dwell, unworthy dis- 
cussions and debates as to the motives which animated 
him are the only tributes which have been paid him by 
the people for whom he did so much. But he sleeps 
peacefully on beside the mighty river, oblivious to the 
pettiness and ingratitude of it all. When history grants 
Marcus Whitman the tardy justice of perspective, over 
that lonely grave a monument worthy of a nation-builder 
shall rise. 



THE FLAG OF THE BEAR 



Because the battles which marked its establishment 
were really only skirmishes, in which but an insignificant 
number of lives were lost, and because it boasted less than 
a thousand citizens all told, certain of our historians have 
been so undiscerning as to assert that the Bear Flag Re- 
public was nothing but a travesty and a farce. Therein 
they are wrong. Though it is doubtless true that the 
handful of frontiersmen who raised their home-made flag, 
with its emblem of a grizzly bear, over the Californian 
presidio of Sonoma on that July morning in 1846 took 
themselves much more seriously than the circumstances 
warranted, it is equally true that their action averted the 
seizure of California by England, and by forcing the hand 
of the administration at Washington was primarily re- 
sponsible for adding what is now California, Nevada, Ari- 
zona, New Mexico, Utah, and more than half of Wyoming 
and Colorado to the Union. The series of intrigues and 
affrays and insurrections which resulted in the Pacific 
coast becoming American instead of European form a 
picturesque, exciting, and virtually unwritten chapter in 
our national history, a chapter in which furtive secret 
agents and haughty caballeros, pioneers in fringed buck- 
skin, and naval officers in gold-laced uniforms all played 
their greater or their lesser parts. 



THE FLAG OF THE BEAR 

To understand fully the conditions which led up to 
the "Bear Flag War," as it has been called, it is neces- 
sary to go back for a moment to the first quarter of the 
last century, when the territory of the United States 
ended at the Rocky Mountains and the red-whlte-and- 
green flag of Mexico floated over the whole of that vast, 
rich region which lay beyond. Under the Mexican 
regime the territory lying west of the Sierra Nevadas 
was divided into the provinces of Alta (or Upper) and 
Baja (or Lower) California, the population of the two 
provinces about 1845 totalling not more than fifteen 
thousand souls, nine-tenths of whom were Mexicans, 
Spaniards, and Indians, the rest American and European 
settlers. The foreigners, among whom Americans 
greatly predominated, soon became influential out of 
all proportion to their numbers. This was particularly 
true of the Americans, who, solidified by common inter- 
ests, common dangers, and common ambitions, ob- 
tained large grants of land, built houses which in cer- 
tain cases were little short of forts, frequently married 
into the most aristocratic of the Californian families, 
and before long practically controlled the commerce of 
the entire territory. 

It was only to be expected, therefore, that the Mexi- 
cans should become more and more apprehensive of 
American ambitions. Nor did President Jackson's offer, 
in 1835, to buy Southern California — an offer which was 
promptly refused — serve to do other than strengthen 

153 



154 Some Forgotten Heroes 

these apprehensions. And to make matters worse, if 
such a thing were possible, Commodore T. apCatesby 
Jones, having heard a rumor that war had broken out 
between the United States and Mexico, and having rea- 
son to believe that the British were preparing to seize 
California, landed a force of bluejackets and marines, and 
on October 21, 1842, raised the American flag over the 
presidio at Monterey. 

Although Commodore Jones, finding he had acted 
upon misinformation, lowered the flag next day and 
tendered an apology to the provincial officials, the inci- 
dent did not tend to relieve the tension which existed 
between the Mexicans and the Americans, for it empha- 
sized the ease with which the country could be seized, 
and hinted with unmistakable plainness at the ulti- 
mate intentions of the United States. That our govern- 
ment intended to annex the Californias at the first 
opportunity that offered the Mexicans were perfectly 
aware, for, aroused by the descriptions of the unbe- 
lievable beauty and fertility of the country as sent back 
by those daring souls who had made their way across 
the ranges, the hearts of our people were set upon its 
acquisition. The great Bay of San Francisco, large 
enough to shelter the navies of the world and the gate- 
way to the Orient, the fruitful, sun-kissed land beyond 
the Sierras, the political domination of America, and 
the commercial domination of the Pacific — such were 
the visions which inspired our people and the motives 
which animated our leaders, and which were intensified 
by the fear of England's designs upon this Western land- 
As the numbers of the American settlers gradually 
Increased, the jealousy and suspicion of the Mexican 
officials became more pronounced. As early as 1826 



The Flag of the Bear 155 

they had driven Captain Jedediah Smith, the first 
American to make his way to CaHfornia by the over- 
land route, back into the mountains, in the midst of 
winter, without companions and without provisions, to 
be killed by the Indians. In 1840 more than one hun- 
dred American settlers were suddenly arrested by the 
Mexican authorities on a trumped-up charge of having 
plotted against the government, marched under military 
guard to Monterey, and confined in the prison there 
under circumstances of the most barbarous cruelty, 
some fifty of them being eventually deported to Mexico 
in chains. 

Thomas O. Larkin, the American consul at Monterey, 
upon visiting the prisoners in the local jail where they 
were confined, found that the cells had no floors, and that 
the poor fellows stood in mud and water to their ankles. 
Sixty of the prisoners he found crowded into a single 
room, twenty feet long and eighteen wide, in which they 
were so tightly packed that they could not all sit at 
the same time, much less lie down. The room being 
without windows or other means of ventilation, the air 
quickly became so fetid that they were able to live only 
by dividing themselves into platoons which took turns 
in standing at the door and getting a few breaths of 
air through the bars. 

These men, whose only crime was that they were 
Americans, were confined in this hell-hole for eight 
days with no food save such as their friends were able 
to smuggle in to them by bribing the sentries. And this 
treatment was accorded them, remember, not because 
they were conspirators — for no one knew better than 
the Mexican authorities that they were not — but be- 
cause it seemed the easiest means of driving them out 



156 Some Forgotten Heroes 

of the country. Throughout the half-dozen years that 
ensued American settlers were subjected to a systematic 
campaign of annoyance, persecution, and imprisonment 
on innumerable frivolous pretexts, being released only 
on their promise to leave California immediately. By 
1845, therefore, the harassed Americans, in sheer despera- 
tion, were ready to grasp the first opportunity which 
presented itself to end this intolerable tyranny for good 
and all. 

It was not only the outrageous treatment to which 
they were subjected, however, nor the weakness and 
instability of the government under which they were 
living, nor even the insecurity of their lives and prop- 
erty and the discouragements to industry, which led 
the American settlers to decide to end Mexican rule in 
the Californias. Texas had recently been annexed by 
the United States against the protests of Mexico, an 
American army of invasion was massed along the Rio 
Grande, and war was certain. It required no extraor- 
dinary degree of intelligence, then, to foresee that the 
coming hostilities would almost inevitably result in 
Mexico losing her Californian provinces. Now it was 
a matter of common knowledge that the Mexican Gov- 
ernment was seriously considering the advisability of 
ceding the Californias to Great Britain, and thus accom- 
plishing the threefold purpose of wiping out the large 
Mexican debt due to British bankers, of winning the 
friendship and possibly the active assistance of England 
in the approaching war with the United States, and of 
preventing the Californias from falling into American 
hands. 

Meanwhile the authorities at Washington had not 
been idle. Though Larkin was ostensibly the American 



The Flag of the Bear 157 

consul at Monterey and nothing more, in reality he was 
clothed with far greater powers, having been hurried 
from Washington to California for the express purpose 
of secretly encouraging an insurrectionary movement 
among the American settlers, and of keeping our gov- 
ernment informed of the plans of the Mexicans and 
British. Receiving information that a powerful British 
fleet — the largest, in fact, which had ever been seen In 
Pacific waters — was about to sail for the coast of Cali- 
fornia, the administration promptly issued orders for a 
squadron of war-ships under Commodore John Drake 
Sloat to proceed at full speed to the Pacific coast, the 
commander being given secret instructions to back up 
Consul Larkin in any action which he might take, and 
upon receiving word that the United States had de- 
clared war against Mexico to immediately occupy the 
Californian ports. 

Then ensued one of the most momentous races in 
history, over a course extending half-way round the 
world, the contestants being the war-fleets of the two 
most powerful maritime nations, and the prize seven 
hundred thousand square miles of immensely rich terri- 
tory and the mastery of the Pacific. Commodore Sloat 
laid his course around the Horn, while the English com- 
mander, Admiral Trowbridge, chose the route through 
the Indian Ocean. The first thing he saw as he entered 
the Bay of Monterey was the American squadron lying 
at anchor in the harbor. 

Never was there a better example of that form of 
territorial expansion which has come to be known as 
"pacific penetration" than the American conquest of 
California; never were the real designs of a nation and 
the schemes of its secret agents more successfully hidden. 



158 Some Forgotten Heroes 

Consul Larkin, as I have already said, was quietly work- 
ing, under confidential instructions from the State De- 
partment, to bring about a revolution in California 
without overt aid from the United States; the Cali- 
fornian coast towns lay under the guns of American war- 
ships, whose commanders likewise had secret instruc- 
tions to land marines and take possession of the country 
at the first opportunity that presented itself; and, as 
though to complete the chain of American emissaries, 
early in 1846 there came riding down from the Sierran 
passes, at the head of what pretended to be an exploring 
and scientific expedition, the man who was to set the 
machinery of conquest actually in motion. 

The commander of the expedition was a young cap- 
tain of engineers, named John Charles Fremont, who, 
as the result of two former journeys of exploration into 
the wilderness beyond the Rockies, had already won the 
sobriquet of "The Pathfinder." Born in Savannah, 
of a French father and a Virginian mother, he was a 
strange combination of aristocrat and frontiersman. 
Dashing, debonair, fearless, reckless, a magnificent 
horseman, a dead shot, a hardy and intrepid explorer, 
equally at home at a White House ball or at an Indian 
powwow, he was probably the most picturesque and 
romantic figure in the United States. These character- 
istics, combined with extreme good looks, a gallant 
manner, and the great public reputation he had won by 
the vivid and interesting accounts he had published of 
his two earlier journeys, had completely captured the 
popular imagination, so that the young explorer had be- 
come a national idol. 

In the spring of 1845 he was despatched by the na- 
tional government on a third expedition, which had as 



The Flag of the Bear 159 

its ostensible object the discovery of a practicable route 
from the Rocky Mountains to the mouth of the Colum- 
bia River, but which was really to lend encouragement 
to the American settlers in California in any secession 
movement which they might be planning and to afford 
them active assistance should war be declared. Just 
how far the government had instructed Fremont to go 
in fomenting a revolution will probably never be known, 
but there is every reason to believe that his father-in- 
law. United States Senator Benton, had advised him 
to seize California if an opportunity presented itself, 
and to trust to luck (and the senator's influence) that 
the government would approve rather than repudiate 
his action. 

All told, Fremont's expedition numbered barely three- 
score men — no great force, surely, with which to over- 
throw a government and win an empire. In advance 
of the little column rode the four Delaware braves 
whom Fremont had brought with him from the East 
to act as scouts and trackers, and whose cunning and 
woodcraft he was willing to match against that of the 
Indians of the plains. Close on their heels rode the 
Pathfinder himself, clad from neck to heel in fringed 
buckskin, at his belt a heavy army revolver and one of 
those vicious, double-bladed knives to which Colonel 
Bowie, of Texas, had already given his name, and on 
his head a jaunty, broad-brimmed hat, from beneath 
which his long, yellow hair fell down upon his shoulders. 
At his bridle arm rode Kit Carson, the most famous of 
the plainsmen, whose exploits against the Indians were 
even then familiar stories in every American household. 
Behind these two stretched out the rank and file of the 
expedition— bronze-faced, bearded, resolute men, well 



i6o Some Forgotten Heroes 

mounted, heavily armed, and all wearing the serviceable 
dress of the frontier. 

Fremont found the American settlers scattered through 
the interior in a state of considerable alarm, for rumors 
had reached them that the Mexican Government had 
decided to drive them out of the country, and that orders 
had been issued to the provincial authorities to incite 
the Indians against them. As they dwelt for the most 
part in small, isolated communities, scattered over a 
great extent of country, it was obvious that, if these 
rumors were true, their lives were in imminent peril. 
They had every reason to expect, moreover, that the 
news of war between Mexico and the United States 
would bring down on them those forms of punishment 
and retaliation for which the Mexicans were notorious. 
They were confronted, therefore, with the alternative 
of abandoning the homes they had built and the fields 
they had tilled and seeking refuge in flight across the 
mountains, or of remaining to face those perils insepara- 
ble from border warfare. Nor did it take them long to 
decide upon resistance, for they were not of the breed 
which runs away. 

Leaving most of his men encamped in the foot-hills, 
Fr6mont pushed on to Monterey, then the most impor- 
tant settlement in Upper California, and the seat of the 
provincial government, where he called upon Don Jose 
Castro, the Mexican commandant, explained the pur- 
poses of his expedition, and requested permission for 
his party to proceed northward to the Columbia through 
the San Joaquin valley. This permission Castro grudg- 
ingly gave, but scarcely had Fremont broken camp be- 
fore the Mexican, who had hastily gathered an over- 
whelming force of soldiers and vaqueros, set out upon 



The Flag of the Bear i6i 

the trail of the Americans with the avowed purpose of 
surprising and exterminating them. Fortunately for 
the Americans, Consul Larkin, getting wind of Castro's 
intended treachery, succeeded in warning Fremont, who 
instead of taking his chances in a battle on the plains 
against a greatly superior force, suddenly occupied the 
precipitous hill lying back of and commanding Monterey, 
known as the Hawk's Peak, intrenched himself there, 
and then sent word to Castro to come and take him. 
Although the Mexican commander made a military 
demonstration before the American intrenchments, he 
was wise enough to refrain from attempting to carry a 
position of such great natural strength and defended by 
such unerring shots as were Fremont's frontiersmen. 
Four days later Fremont, feeling that there was noth- 
ing to be gained by holding the position longer, and con- 
fident that the Mexicans would be only too glad to see 
his back, quietly broke camp one night and resumed his 
march toward Oregon. 

Scarcely had he crossed the Oregon line, however, 
before he was overtaken by a messenger on a reeking 
horse, who had been despatched by Consul Larkin to 
inform him that an officer with urgent despatches from 
Washington had arrived at Monterey and was hastening 
northward to overtake him. Fremont immediately 
turned back, and on the shores of Greater Klamath 
Lake met Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie, who had trav- 
elled from New York to Vera Cruz by steamer, had 
crossed Mexico to Mazatlan on horseback, and had been 
brought up the Pacific coast to Monterey In an Ameri- 
can war-ship. 

The exact contents of the despatches with which 
Gillespie had been intrusted will probably never be 



1 62 Some Forgotten Heroes 

known, for having reason to believe that his mission was 
suspected by the Mexicans, and being fearful of arrest, 
he had destroyed the despatches after committing their 
contents to memory. These contents he communicated 
to Fremont, and the fact that the latter immediately 
turned his horse's head Californiaward is the best 
proof that they contained definite instructions for him 
to stir up the American settlers to revolt and so gain 
California for the Union by what some one has aptly 
described as "neutral conquest." 

The news of Fremont's return spread among the 
scattered settlers as though by wireless, and from all 
parts of the country hardy, determined men came pour- 
ing into camp to offer him their services. But his hands 
were tied. His instructions from Washington, while 
ordering him to lend his encouragement to an insur- 
rectionary movement, expressly forbade him to take the 
initiative in any hostilities until he received word that 
war with Mexico had been declared — and that word 
had not yet come. These facts he communicated to 
the settlers. Fremont's assurance that the American 
Government sympathized with their aspirations for inde- 
pendence, and could be counted upon to back up any 
action they might take to secure it, was all that the 
settlers asked. 

On the evening of June 13, 1846, some fifty Americans 
living along the Sacramento River met at the ranch of 
an old Indian-fighter and bear-hunter named Captain 
Meredith, and under his leadership rode across the 
country in a northwesterly direction through the night. 
Dawn found them close to the presidio of Sonoma, 
which was the residence of the Mexican general Vallejo 
and the most important military post north of San 



The Flag of the Bear 163 

Francisco. Leaving their horses in the shelter of the 
forest, the Americans stole silently forward in the dim- 
ness of the early morning, overpowered the sentries, 
burst in the gates, and had taken possession of the 
town and surrounded the barracks before the garrison 
was fairly awake. General Vallejo and his officers 
were captured in their beds, and were sent under guard 
to a fortified ranch known as Sutter's Fort, which was 
situated some distance in the interior. In addition 
to the prisoners, nine field-guns, several hundred stands 
of arms, and a considerable supply of ammunition fell 
Into the hands of the Americans. The first blow had 
been struck in the conquest of California. 

The question now arose as to what they should do 
with the town they had captured, for Fremont had no 
authority to take it over for the United States, or to 
muster the men who took it into the American service. 
The embattled settlers found themselves, in fact, to be 
in the embarrassing position of being men without a 
country. After a council of war they decided to organ- 
ize a pro-tem. government of their own to administer 
the territory until such time as it should be formally 
annexed to the United States. I doubt if a government 
was ever established so quickly and under such rough- 
and-ready circumstances. After an informal ballot it 
was announced that William B. Ide, a leading spirit 
among the settlers, had been unanimously elected gov- 
ernor and commander-in-chief "of the independent 
forces"; John H. Nash, who had been a justice of the 
peace in the East before he had emigrated to California, 
being named chief justice of the new republic. 

For a full-fledged nation not to have a flag of its own 
was, of course, unthinkable; so, as most of its citizens 



164 Some Forgotten Heroes 

were hunters and adventurers, when some one suggested 
that the grizzly bear, because of its indomitable courage 
and tenacity and its ferocity when aroused, would make 
a peculiarly appropriate emblem for the new banner, 
the suggestion was adopted with enthusiasm, and a com- 
mittee of two was appointed to put it into immediate 
execution. A young settler named William Ford, who 
had been imprisoned by the Mexicans in the jail at So- 
noma, and who had been released when his countrymen 
captured the place, and William Todd, an emigrant 
from Illinois, were the makers of the flag. On a piece 
of unbleached cotton cloth, a yard wide and a yard 
and a half long, they painted the rude figure of a grizzly 
bear ready to give battle. This strange banner they 
raised, at noon on June 14, amid a storm of cheers and 
a salute from the captured cannon, on the staff where 
so recently had floated the flag of Mexico, and from it 
the Bear Flag Republic took its name. 

Scarcely had Fremont received the news of the cap- 
ture of Sonoma and the proclamation of the Bear Flag 
Republic than word reached him that a large force of 
Mexicans was on its w^y to retake the town. Disre- 
garding his instructions from Washington, and throwing 
all caution to the winds, Fremont instantly decided to 
stake everything on giving his support to his imperilled 
countrymen. His own men reinforced by a number of 
volunteers, he arrived at Sonoma, after a forced march 
of thirty-six hours, only to find the Bear Flag men still 
in possession. The number of the enemy, as well as 
their intentions, had, it seems, been greatly exaggerated, 
the force in question being but a small party of troopers 
which Castro had despatched to the Mission of San 
Rafael, on the north shore of San Francisco Bay, to 



The Flag of the Bear 165 

prevent several hundred cavalry remounts which were 
stabled there from falling into the hands of the Ameri- 
cans. 

Realizing the value of these horses to the settlers in 
the guerilla campaign which seemed likely to ensue, 
Fremont succeeded in capturing them after a sharp 
skirmish with the Mexicans. Hurrying back to Sonoma, 
he learned that during his absence Ide and his men had 
repulsed an attack by a body of Mexican regulars, 
under General de la Torre, reinforced by a band of 
ruffians and desperadoes led by an outlaw named Pa- 
dilla, inflicting so sharp a defeat that the only enemies 
left in that part of the country were the scattered fugi- 
tives from this force, these being hunted down and sum- 
marily dealt with by the frontiersmen. Having now 
irrevocably committed himself to the insurgent cause, 
and feeling that, if he were to be hanged, it might as 
well be for a sheep as for a lamb, Fremont decided on 
the capture of San Francisco. 

The San Francisco of 1846 had little in common with 
the San Francisco of to-day, remember, for on the site 
where the great Western metropolis now stands there was 
nothing but a village consisting of a few score adobe 
houses and the Mexican presidio, or fort, the latter con- 
taining a considerable supply of arms and ammunition. 
Accompanied by Kit Carson, Lieutenant Gillespie, and 
a small detachment of his men, Fremont crossed the Bay 
of San Francisco in a sailing-boat by night, and took 
the Mexican garrison so completely by surprise that they 
surrendered without firing a shot. The gateway to the 
Orient was ours. 

Fremont now prepared to take the offensive against 
Castro, who was retreating on Los Angeles, but just as 



1 66 Some Forgotten Heroes 

he was about to start on his march southward a messen- 
ger brought the news that Admiral Sloat, having re- 
ceived word that hostihties had commenced along the 
Rio Grande, had landed his marines at Monterey, and 
on July 7, to the thunder of saluting war-ships, had 
raised the American flag over the presidio, and had 
proclaimed the annexation of California to the Union. 
When the Bear Flag men learned the great news they 
went into a frenzy of enthusiasm; whooping, shouting, 
singing snatches of patriotic songs, and firing their pis- 
tols in the air. Quickly the standard of the fighting 
grizzly was lowered and the flag of stripes and stars 
hoisted in its place, while the rough-clad, bearded settlers, 
who had waited so long and risked so much that this 
very thing might come to pass, sang the Doxology with 
tears running down their faces. As the folds of the 
familiar banner caught the breeze and floated out over 
the flat-roofed houses of the little town, Ide, the late 
chief of the three-weeks republic, jumping on a powder- 
barrel, swung his sombrero in the air and shouted: 
"Now, boys, all together, three cheers for the Union!" 
The moist eyes and the lumps in the throats brought 
by the sight of the old flag did not prevent the little 
band of frontiersmen from responding with a roar which 
made the windows of Sonoma rattle. 

Now, as a matter of fact, Admiral Sloat had placed 
himself in a very embarrassing position, for he had 
based his somewhat precipitate action in seizing Cali- 
fornia on what he had every reason to believe was au- 
thentic news that war between the United States and 
Mexico had actually begun, but which proved next day 
to be merely an unconfirmed rumor. If a state of war 
really did exist, then both Sloat and Fremont were justi- 



The Flag of the Bear 167 

fied in their aggressions; but if it did not, then they 
might have considerable difficulty in explaining their 
action in commencing hostihties against a nation with 
which we were at peace. So Sloat began "to get cold 
feet," asserting that he was forced to act as he had be- 
cause he had received reliable information that the 
British, whose fleet was lying off Monterey, were on the 
point of seizing California themselves. Fremont, on 
his part, claimed to have acted in defense of the Ameri- 
can settlers in the interior, who without his assistance 
would have been massacred by the Mexicans. 

At this juncture Commodore Stockton arrived at 
Monterey in the frigate Congress, and as Sloat was now 
thoroughly frightened and only too glad to transfer 
the responsibility he had assumed to other shoulders, 
Stockton, who was the junior officer, asked for and 
readily obtained permission to assume command of the 
operations. Fremont, who had reached Monterey with 
several hundred riflemen, was appointed commander-in- 
chief of the land forces by Stockton, and was ordered 
to embark his men on one of the war-ships and proceed 
at once to capture San Diego, at that time by far the 
most important place in California. Stockton himself, 
after raising the American flag over San Francisco and 
Santa Barbara, sailed down the coast to San Pedro, 
the port of Los Angeles, where he disembarked a force 
of bluejackets and marines for the taking of the latter 
city, within which the Mexican commander. General 
Castro, had shut himself up with a considerable number 
of troops, and where he promised to make a desperate 
resistance. 

As Stockton came marching up from San Pedro at 
the head of his column he was met by a Mexican carry- 



1 68 Some Forgotten Heroes 

ing a flag of truce and bearing a message from Castro 
warning the American commander in the most solemn 
terms that if his forces dared to set foot within Los 
Angeles they would be going to their own funerals. 
"Present my compliments to General Castro," Stockton 
told the messenger, "and ask him to have the kindness 
to have the church bells tolled for our funerals at eight 
o'clock to-morrow morning, for at that hour I shall enter 
the city." Upon receipt of this disconcerting message 
Castro slipped out of Los Angeles that night, without 
firing a shot in its defense, and at eight o'clock on the 
following morning, Stockton, just as he had promised, 
came riding in at the head of his men. 

After garrisoning the surrounding towns and ridding 
the countryside of prowling bands of Mexican guerillas, 
Stockton officially proclaimed California a Territory of 
the United States, instituted a civil government along 
American lines, and appointed Fremont as the first 
Territorial governor. Before the year 1846 had drawn 
to a close these two Americans, the one a rough-and- 
ready sailor, the other a youthful and impetuous soldier, 
assisted by a few hundred marines and frontiersmen, 
had completed the conquest and pacification of a terri- 
tory having a greater area and greater natural resources 
than those of all the countries conquered by Napoleon 
put together. 

Thus ended the happy, lazy, luxury-loving society 
of Spanish California. Another society, less luxurious, 
less light-hearted, less contented, but more energetic, 
more progressive, and better fitted for the upbuilding 
of a nation, took its place. There are still to be found 
in California a few men, white-haired and stoop-shoul- 
dered now, who were themselves actors in this drama I 



The Flag of the Bear 169 

have described, and who delight to tell of those stirring 
days when Fremont and his frontiersmen came riding 
down from the passes, and the embattled settlers of 
Sonoma founded their short-lived Republic of the Bear. 



